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Preserving and Canning Fruit and Vegetables: Boil
Let the sirup come to a boil, add the remaining 10 quarts of berries and heat slowly. Boil ten minutes from the time it begins to bubble and skim carefully while boiling. Can and seal as above directed.
For currants the process is the same as for raspberries and blackberries, but the proportions are different, namely: 4 quarts of sugar to 12 of fruit. For raspberries and currants combined use 2½ quarts of sugar to 3 quarts of currants and 10 quarts of raspberries. First express the juice from the currants as above directed, then proceed as for raspberries.
For green gooseberries use 1½ quarts of sugar and 1 pint of water to 6 quarts of fruit. Dissolve the sugar in the water, add the fruit and cook fifteen minutes. Or can the same as rhubarb. For ripe gooseberries use only one-half as much water.
For blueberries use 1 quart of sugar and 1 pint of water to 12 quarts of berries. Put all together in the preserving kettle and heat slowly. Boil fifteen minutes from the time the mixture begins to bubble.
This is the tail end of a longer set of berry-canning directions, and the part it leans on — "can and seal as above directed" — is the part that no longer meets any current standard. The notes below explain the scale, the vocabulary, and why the method itself is the problem.
- Open-kettle canning is the failure pointOpen-kettle canning is the likely failure point -- The directions this passage leans on ("can and seal as above directed") are not in this excerpt, but period instructions of this kind are usually the open-kettle method: boiling the fruit, ladling it into jars and sealing with no further processing. Open-kettle canning has been rejected by extension services for decades, because nothing sterilizes the jar rim, the lid, the ladle, or the air trapped under the seal, so mold and yeast contamination and seal failure are common. High-acid fruit will not support botulinum growth, but it spoils readily, and a jar that unseals quietly in a cupboard is not detectable by looking at it.
- No processing time or temperature is givenNo processing time or temperature is given here -- This passage specifies boiling times for the fruit but says nothing about how long filled jars are held at what temperature; no processing figure appears anywhere in the text as reproduced. Modern tested recipes give a boiling-water-bath time adjusted for jar size and altitude. Use a current tested berry-canning recipe instead.
- Sugar is not doing preservative work hereOne quart of sugar to twelve quarts of blueberries is a flavoring proportion, not a preserving one. Unlike a jam or a heavy syrup pack, these ratios leave a product with high water activity, entirely dependent on the seal for keeping.
- The quantities are commercial in scaleTwelve quarts of berries is roughly 18-20 lb, and the sugar is measured by volume rather than weight — a quart of granulated sugar is about 1 lb 12 oz. The recipe assumes a household putting up a season's fruit at once in a large preserving kettle, not a batch of four jars.
- "Express the juice"For the currant versions, this means crushing the currants and straining off the juice, leaving skins and seeds behind, before the sugar goes in. Currants are high in pectin and acid.
- The boiling times would not be used nowTen to fifteen minutes of hard boiling will break down raspberries and blackberries and drive off much of their aroma; modern berry recipes generally heat the fruit only briefly before it is processed.
Household Discoveries belongs to the great era of American home canning, when a family's winter fruit came out of glass jars sealed in the kitchen in July and August. The proportions here reflect that: currants and gooseberries, both cheap, hardy, heavy-cropping bush fruits common in nineteenth-century kitchen gardens, and the classic raspberry-and-currant combination. Gooseberries and currants largely vanished from American gardens after federal and state campaigns to eradicate Ribes as a host of white pine blister rust — programmes that ran from about 1911 into the 1960s, with the federal ban not lifted until 1966 — one reason a page that treats them as staples reads as unfamiliar today. The sealing method the recipe assumes was standard practice at the time and was still being printed in household manuals well into the 1930s; the shift to timed boiling-water-bath and pressure processing came out of the twentieth-century agricultural extension services, and it is the single biggest gap between period canning instructions and modern ones.