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Preserving and Canning Fruit and Vegetables: Stir
For peaches and ripe pears use 1 quart of sugar and 3 quarts of water to 8 quarts of fruit. Prepare the fruit either whole or in halves as desired. If the latter, remove all the pits except a few in each jar which retain for the sake of their flavor. Stir the sugar into the water over the fire until dissolved and bring slowly to a boil. Skim carefully and let stand where it will remain hot but not boil. Put only a single layer of the prepared fruit in the preserving kettle at a time and cover with some of the hot sirup. Bring slowly to a boil, skim carefully, boil gently for ten minutes, or longer if not fully ripe, can and seal. The fruit is not done until it can be readily pierced with a straw or a silver fork. Unripe or hard pears will require much longer boiling.
For quinces use 1½ quarts of sugar and 2 quarts of water to 4 quarts of fruit. Rub the fruit hard with a coarse crash towel. Then wash and drain. Pare, quarter and core and drop the pieces into cold water acidulated with lemon juice.
Cover the fruit in the preserving kettle with plenty of cold water, bring slowly to a boil and let simmer until tender. Remove the pieces one by one as soon as they can readily be pierced with a silver fork and let drain on a platter. Now strain the water in which the fruit was cooked through cheese cloth and put 2 quarts of the strained liquid over the fire. Stir in the sugar until dissolved, bring slowly to a boil, skim well, add the cooked fruit and boil gently for about twenty minutes. a For crab-apples use 1½ quarts of sugar and 2 quarts of water to 6 quarts of apples. A part of the stem may be left on the fruit if desired, but wash carefully and especially rub well the blossom end. Stir the sugar into the water over the fire until dissolved, bring slowly to a boil, skim, add the fruit and cook gently from twenty to fifty minutes, or until tender, depending upon the kind of fruit.
For plums use 2 quarts of sugar and 1 pint of water to 8 quarts of fruit. Wash and drain the fruit and remove the skins if desired as above suggested. Or if they are left on, prick them thoroughly with a fruit pricker to prevent bursting. Stir the sugar into the water over the fire until dissolved, bring to a boil and carefully skim. Add the fruit in small quantities one or two layers at a time, cook five minutes, can and seal and so continue, adding more sirup from time to time if necessary.
FRUIT PRESERVING While the modern method of canning fruits with small quantities of sugar or none at all is to be preferred in most cases, there are a few fruits which make preserves of such excellent quality that their use may be recommended for special occasions. These are strawberries, sour cherries, sour plums and quinces.
They should be put up preferably in tumblers or small jars.
These are open-kettle instructions: hot fruit is ladled into jars and sealed, with no processing of the filled jar and no stated seal type. That method was standard in 1908 and is no longer considered sound, so the notes below explain the gaps rather than patch them.
- Why the method fails"Can and seal" here means filling jars with boiling fruit and closing them, relying on the escaping steam to pull a vacuum. Nothing sterilizes the jar rim, the lid, or the headspace air after filling, and no processing time or temperature is given for the sealed jar. Modern practice processes filled jars in a boiling-water bath for a measured time because unprocessed jars routinely fail to seal or reseal and then mould from the inside. Use a current tested recipe from a state extension service or the USDA guide.
- Sealing hardwareBooks of this period generally assume zinc caps with rubber rings or wax-sealed tumblers; the recipe itself names no closure, mentioning only "tumblers or small jars" for the preserves. Neither of those closures gives a reliable modern vacuum seal, and today's two-piece lids are designed to seal during and after a timed bath process rather than in a still jar of hot syrup, so the original instruction does not translate directly onto current jars.
- The peach pitsRetaining "a few in each jar" for flavour leaves stones in contact with the syrup for months. Peach, plum and apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when a kernel is broken or crushed; whole intact pits were traditionally tolerated, but no quantity is measured here and long storage is the wrong place to test it.
- Quantities and vesselsA quart of granulated sugar is roughly 1 lb 12 oz, and these are volume-to-volume ratios of fruit rather than weights, so the syrup strength varies with how the fruit is cut and packed. A "preserving kettle" is a wide, shallow pan, usually copper, brass or enamelled ware; "tumblers" are straight-sided glasses, commonly closed with a paraffin disc — a closure no longer recommended.
- Archaic termsA "crash towel" is coarse linen toweling, used here to scrub the grey fuzz off quinces. A "fruit pricker" is a small multi-needle tool for perforating plum skins; a sterilised needle does the same. "Acidulated water" is water with lemon juice, to keep pared quince from browning.
- Doneness testsThe straw and silver-fork tests are sound and still useful: a straw slips through cooked fruit without resistance, and silver was specified because iron and steel discoloured acid fruit. Stainless steel is fine now.
- What the timings are really forThe five to fifty minutes given for the various fruits cook the fruit and drive out air; they do nothing for the jar. The quince is simmered tender in water first and then given about twenty minutes in the syrup; long cooking is also what deepens quince colour.
Household Discoveries belongs to the moment when "preserving" and "canning" were pulling apart. Preserving meant sugar in quantity, near-syrup density, and a cool dark shelf; canning meant heat and an airtight jar, and the note appended here — that "the modern method of canning fruits with small quantities of sugar or none at all is to be preferred" — shows the newer thinking already winning, with heavy sugar preserves demoted to strawberries, sour cherries, sour plums and quinces put up in tumblers "for special occasions." The fruits chosen lean toward the dooryard rather than the market: quinces and crab apples are high in pectin and acid and keep well, and both are now uncommon in home cooking. Open-kettle filling of the sort described was a common household method for decades and can still be found in printed guidance into the 1930s; it was displaced gradually as extension services and jar manufacturers established timed boiling-water processing as the standard for high-acid fruit.