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: Pick
Stringbeans. - Pick these when young and tender, string, break into CANNING FRUIT AND VEGETABLES short lengths, pack firmly in the jar, cover with cold water and add a teaspoonful of salt to each quart. Otherwise proceed as for corn. Add a small bit of red pepper in the bottom of each jar, if desired. Eggplant. - Pare, cut in thin slices and drop into boiling water for fifteen or twenty minutes. Drain and pack in jars. Proceed as for corn. Remove in slices when required and fry in bread crumbs, or make into puddings and bake.
Beets.-Pull while young and tender. Cut off the tops, wash and drop in boiling water for one and a half hours, or until thoroughly cooked. Skin, slice and pack in jars. Proceed as for corn. To pickle, cover with equal parts of water and good vinegar and sweeten to taste.
Okra or Gumbo.-Pick the pods while young and tender, wash, cut in short lengths and sterilize as above.
Use for soups and stews.
Summer Squash.-Cut into small blocks, pack, cover with water, add salt and sterilize as above. Or skin, boil or steam until well cooked, mash, pack and sterilize. But in this case steam for an hour and a half each day as the heat penetrates the jar more slowly. Each jar will contain about twice as much of the cooked vegetable as if uncooked.
English Peas. Choose young sweet peas and proceed as for corn.
This product has all the delicate flavor of the fresh vegetable.
Asparagus.-Can the tips only, the same as for corn.
These are low-acid vegetables processed by repeated boiling-water or steam heating, a method the canning world abandoned once the cause of botulism was understood. The notes below explain what the text assumes and why the method cannot be salvaged by adjusting times.
- "Proceed as for corn"The whole page hangs on an instruction given elsewhere in the book: pack, cover, and steam or boil the sealed jars for a period on each of several successive days. This is the old intermittent or "fractional" sterilisation, and it is the reason every item here is unsafe.
- Why repeated boiling does not workBoiling water reaches 212F. Clostridium botulinum spores are highly heat-resistant and can survive prolonged boiling at that temperature in a sealed, low-acid jar. The successive-day heatings were meant to germinate and then kill spores in stages, but the method cannot be relied on; a sealed jar of beans, peas, corn or asparagus at room temperature is an ideal oxygen-free environment for any surviving spores to grow and produce toxin.
- Every vegetable listed is low-acidStringbeans, eggplant, beets, okra, summer squash, peas and asparagus all sit above pH 4.6. None of them can be safely processed in a boiling-water bath at any duration. Current USDA guidance requires a pressure canner at 240-250F with tested times for each vegetable and jar size.
- The teaspoon of salt is not a preservativeA teaspoon of salt per quart is a seasoning at that dilution. Neither it nor the "small bit of red pepper" contributes any meaningful antimicrobial effect.
- Mashed squash is the worst caseThe book itself notes that heat penetrates a jar of mashed squash more slowly and calls for an hour and a half each day. Dense purees are exactly the products modern guidance refuses to approve for home canning at all, in any vessel, because the cold spot at the centre cannot be reliably predicted.
- The pickled beet variation"Equal parts of water and good vinegar" gives no acid strength and no measured proportion of beet to liquid, so the finished pH is unknown. Acidification only makes a vegetable safe for boiling-water processing when the quantities are measured against a tested recipe.
- Toxin you cannot detectBotulinum toxin has no smell, no taste and does not necessarily swell the lid. A jar can look and smell sound and still be lethal, which is why spoilage cues offered in books of this era are worthless as a safety check.
- What to do insteadUse a current USDA or National Center for Home Food Preservation recipe with a pressure canner, or freeze these vegetables. Read this page as a document, not a procedure.
This page appears to belong to a generation of household manuals written before the canning of low-acid vegetables was properly understood. Home canning had spread rapidly in the late nineteenth century on the back of cheap glass jars and rubber-ringed lids, and the intermittent sterilisation described here, heating on successive days, was borrowed in good faith from bacteriological practice of the period; it was widely printed and widely believed. What it did not account for was the heat resistance of bacterial spores. Botulism outbreaks traced to home-canned vegetables in the 1910s and 1920s prompted a wave of research, and through the 1920s and 1930s American extension services pushed the pressure canner for anything that was not fruit, tomatoes or pickles, though intermittent methods continued to be printed for years afterwards. Notice, too, how the entries assume a garden rather than a market: pick the pods young, pull the beets young, can only the asparagus tips. This is a book for households putting up their own produce in season, and the confidence of "this product has all the delicate flavor of the fresh vegetable" speaks for itself.