Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Preserving and Canning Fruit and Vegetables: Measure
For cherries use 1½ quarts of sugar and pint of water to 6 quarts of fruit. Measure after stemming. Stone or not as preferred, but if the stones are removed, take care to save the juice. First stir the sugar into the water over the fire until dissolved, then add the cherries and bring slowly to a boil.
Let boil ten minutes, skimming carefully.
For grapes use 1 quart of sugar and 1 gill of water to 6 quarts of fruit. First squeeze the pulp from the skins. Cook it five minutes and rub through a fine sieve to remove the seeds. Now bring the water, skins and pulp slowly to a boil.
Skim, stir in the sugar and boil fifteen minutes. If the grapes are sweeter or more sour than ordinary, use more or less sugar, according to taste.
Rhubarb may be cooked and canned with sugar in the same manner as gooseberries, or either rhubarb or gooseberries may be canned without heat as follows: Cut the rhubarb when young ana tender, wash thoroughly, pare and divide into pieces about two inches long.
Pack in sterilized jars, fill to overflowing with cold water and let stand ten minutes. Drain off the water and once more fill to overflowing with fresh cold water. Seal with sterilized rings and covers. When the cans are opened the rhubarb may be used in all respects the same as if fresh.
CANNING LARGE FRUIT Such large fruit as apples, pears, peaches and quinces must usually be pared and cored before canning. Select first class fruit just before it is ripe-preferably underripe rather than overripe-and discard all imperfect specimens. It is better not to can or preserve spotted or bruised fruit, but if such are used, all decayed or bruised spots must be freely cut out. Measure the fruit as soon as it is pared and cored into a large bowl containing cold water made slightly acid with lemon juice at the rate of one tablespoonful to the quart. This will keep the fruit from turning brown. For each measure add the proportionate quantity of sugar into another bowl until the amount of fruit and sugar needed to fill the preserving kettle or required number of jars is at hand. a To peel peaches, plums or tomatoes, have ready a deep kettle little more than half full of boiling water. Fill a wire basket or colander with the fruit and suspend it by means of a string through the handles, or otherwise, in the boiling water for three minutes. Now remove and plunge the basket for a moment into a pan of cold water.
Let drain a few moments and peel.
The process of canning in general is much the same for all fruits, but the following special modifications for particular fruits may be observed:
This page collects the fruit-by-fruit variations from a chapter on home preserving written before the microbiology of canning was understood. The techniques it describes — open-kettle filling and, worse, a cold-water pack with no heat at all — are not sound preservation methods, and the sections below explain why rather than how to repair them.
- Open-kettle canning is the core failureBoiling fruit in a preserving kettle and sealing it in jars leaves no step that heats the sealed jar and its headspace. Contamination from the jar rim, the lid and the air during filling is routine, and nothing afterwards destroys it. Current guidelines call for a measured processing time in a boiling-water or pressure canner for every product.
- The uncooked rhubarb pack is the most dangerous item hereThe uncooked rhubarb pack is the least sound item here -- Raw rhubarb sealed under plain cold water receives no heat at all, so nothing destroys the moulds, yeasts and bacteria carried in on the stalks. Rhubarb's own high acidity makes it a poor medium for Clostridium botulinum compared with a genuinely low-acid vegetable, but an unheated sealed jar is not a tested preservation method and current guidance does not sanction it.
- "Sterilized rings and covers" does not mean a sterile jarSterilizing the vessel does nothing about organisms introduced with the food or during filling, and bacterial spores survive boiling in any case.
- A gillFor readers working through the text: a gill is a quarter of a pint, four fluid ounces, half a cup. The grape entry calls for one gill of water to six quarts of fruit.
- The cherry proportions are unusable as printedThe sugar and water quantities for cherries do not read as a coherent ratio against six quarts of fruit. Do not attempt to guess at them; the grape entry, at one quart of sugar to six quarts of fruit, gives a better sense of the sweetening level this book intended.
- What is still worth borrowingTwo habits here remain standard practice: holding pared fruit in water acidulated with lemon juice, about a tablespoon to the quart, to stop browning; and dipping peaches, plums or tomatoes in boiling water then cold to slip the skins. Both are handling techniques, not preservation, and are safe in any modern kitchen.
- If you want to put up fruitUse a current tested recipe with a stated jar size, headspace and processing time. Nothing on this page supplies those three numbers, which is the whole of the problem.
Household Discoveries belongs to the turn-of-the-century wave of American domestic encyclopedias, published when glass jars with rubber-ring seals had made home canning a normal summer chore in ordinary kitchens rather than a specialist craft. The open-kettle method described here — cook the fruit, ladle it hot into a hot jar, screw down the ring — was common advice of the day, and for high-acid, heavily sugared fruit it often worked well enough to pass unquestioned. The cold-water rhubarb pack reflects an old observation that rhubarb keeps its fresh appearance for months in a sealed jar of water; the trouble is that looking fresh and being safe are different things. Study of botulism outbreaks in home- and commercially canned goods through the 1910s and 1920s, and the extension work that followed, replaced all of this with measured processing times and, for low-acid foods, the pressure canner.