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Preserving and Canning Fruit and Vegetables: Bring
CANNING FRUIT AND VEGETABLES For strawberries use equal weights of sugar and fruit. Put a layer of berries in the bottom of the preserving kettle and sprinkle over it a layer of sugar. So continue until the fruit and sugar are about four inches deep. Bring slowly to a boil, skim carefully and boil ten minutes from the time it begins to bubble.
Now pour upon platters to a depth of about two or three inches and place these in a sunny window in an unused room for three or four days, when the preserve will thicken to a jelly-like consistency. Put the cold preserve into jars or tumblers and seal. The large proportion of sugar present in this and other preserves is unfavorable to the growth of bacteria and thus prevents them from spoiling.
For white currants select large firm fruit, remove the stems and proceed as for strawberries.
For cherries select the sour varieties such as Early Richmonds and Montmorency. Remove stems and stones and proceed as for strawberries. Or cherries may be preserved with currant juice. Use for this purpose 2 quarts of sugar to 3 quarts of currants by heating in a preserving kettle, crushing them as they boil up and straining through cheese cloth. Stem and stone the cherries taking care to save all the juice.
Add the cherries to the fruit juice, stir in the sugar over the fire, bring to a boil slowly and carefully skim.
Boil twenty minutes. Put in sterilized jars or tumblers and seal. This gives an acid preserve. The quantity of sugar may be doubled if desired. For plum preserve use 2 quarts of sugar to 1 pint of water and 4 quarts of greengage or other plums.
If the skins are left on, prick the fruit and cover with plenty of cold water. Bring slowly to a boil and let boil gently for five minutes.
This is a group of open-kettle preserves finished by sun-thickening, and the sealing method it describes is the part that no longer meets any current standard. The sugar chemistry it relies on is real, but the handling around it is not.
- The hinge, and the failureThe strawberries are boiled ten minutes, then poured onto open platters and left in a window for three or four days to thicken. Three days of uncovered, ambient-temperature fruit is an open invitation to airborne mold spores, wild yeasts, dust and insects, and nothing afterwards kills what settles. The preserve then goes into jars cold, so there is no final heat step and no vacuum.
- "Seal" meant something elseThe recipe does not say what the closure was. In books of this general period sealing a tumbler commonly meant a disk of paper, a poured layer of paraffin wax, or a lid pressed on while the jar was still warm. None of these produces a tested hermetic seal, and paraffin sealing of jams was dropped from official recommendations because mold grows readily in the gap beneath the wax.
- Sugar is not a guaranteeThe text's claim that heavy sugar is "unfavorable to the growth of bacteria" is broadly true for bacteria, which is why jam rarely poisons anyone. It says nothing about osmophilic yeasts and molds, which thrive at these sugar levels and are the actual spoilage organisms in a sun preserve. Some of those molds produce mycotoxins that do not stay confined to the fuzzy patch you scrape off.
- The cherry-and-currant versionThis one at least specifies sterilized jars and a twenty-minute boil, but it is still open-kettle: filled hot, sealed, and never processed in a boiling-water bath. Open-kettle canning is no longer considered adequate even for high-acid fruit, because the seal is unverified and the jar rim is recontaminated during filling.
- Vegetables in the section titleThe heading promises vegetables; the text delivers only fruit. That is just as well. Low-acid vegetables carry a genuine Clostridium botulinum risk and cannot be safely home-canned by any boiling-water or open-kettle method at all. If you found a vegetable recipe in this style, it would be considerably more dangerous than these.
- The plum recipe is incompleteThe plum entry gives 2 quarts sugar, 1 pint water and 4 quarts greengages, then breaks off after a five-minute gentle boil with no finishing, filling or sealing instruction. There is not enough here to follow even if the method were sound.
- What to use insteadWork from a current tested preserving guide — a national extension service or the manufacturer's instructions for your jars. The fruit-to-sugar ratios here are unremarkable and match modern full-sugar jam; it is only the sun-drying and the sealing that need to be discarded.
Sun preserves have a long history in warm-climate and rural households: rather than boil fruit down hard on the stove, which dulls colour and flavour, cooks gave it a short boil and then let solar heat and slow evaporation finish the set. The result keeps a brighter red and a fresher taste than a long-cooked jam, which is why the technique persisted in family recipe books well past the point when commercial pectin and standardised jar processing had made it unnecessary. The varieties named point in a general way to the American home-preserving world — Early Richmond and Montmorency are two classic sour cherries of North American orchards, and the greengage is often said to have been favoured for preserving on account of its high sugar and firm flesh. The confident line about sugar discouraging bacteria may reflect how far germ theory had filtered into domestic manuals; the trouble is that the author drew the obvious conclusion about bacteria and stopped there, before molds and yeasts entered the picture. Guidance on safe home canning was still years away from the systematic testing that produced the processing tables cooks rely on now.