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 page gives advice for salvaging or disguising food that has begun to spoil. Spoiled food can carry dangerous bacteria and toxins that no washing, soaking, or seasoning removes; it should be discarded.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Seal
When cool put the jars in a saucepan full of cold water, place it on the stove, and boil half an hour or more. Seal air tight while hot and store in a cool place. -- Nasturtiums.
Collect the seeds while young and tender. Place them in a double boiler, cover with strong cold brine. Let stand for an hour, then place on the stove and bring to a boil. When they boil up take them out of the skimmer, put them into a suitable jar, and cover them with boiling hot spiced pickling liquid.
Or have at hand a jar of sweetened spice vinegar and into this drop nasturtium seeds picked as they accumulate during the season before they become hard and woody. They make an excellent substitute for capers and an agreeable addition to salads or sandwiches.
Pickled Barberries. - To pickle barberries for a garnish, especially for cold meats, salads, and the like, select the large, firm bunches of berries of a fine deep red. Remove the leaves and the discolored berries. Place them in jars and cover with brine strong enough to float an egg. Seal to exclude the air, or cover with paraffin or waxed paper. If any scum or mold appears upon the surface pour out the barberries on a cloth strainer, dry them between two cloths, and cover them with fresh brine.
To Pickle Mushrooms.
This is a fragment of a longer pickling chapter, and it fails on several counts that matter: the quantities are unmeasured, the sealing method predates any understanding of botulism, and one instruction explicitly tells the reader to rescue mouldy food. The notes below explain the terms and the specific hazards rather than offering a working method.
- The mould instruction is the disqualifierPouring off spoiled barberries, drying them between cloths and re-brining them does not remove anything. Surface mould on a brined product signals that the brine has failed and that microbial growth has already penetrated the fruit; visible growth is also frequently accompanied by metabolites that no rinsing or fresh salt removes. The batch belongs in the bin.
- "Strong enough to float an egg" is not a measurementThe float test indicates a heavy brine, but the salt concentration it corresponds to varies with the egg, its age and the water temperature, and it tells you nothing about the final salt concentration in the fruit once equilibrium is reached. Modern brining is specified by weight percentage precisely because this test is unreliable.
- Barberries in plain brine are a low-acid packSalt alone, at an unverified strength, with a paraffin or waxed-paper cover rather than a hermetic seal, is not a preservation method that can be relied on to exclude Clostridium botulinum. Paraffin seals were widely used in this period and are no longer considered safe for anything but high-sugar jellies, and not really for those.
- "Boil half an hour" in a saucepan of waterThis is a boiling-water bath, which reaches only 212F. It is adequate for high-acid packs and inadequate for anything low-acid, regardless of duration. Half an hour of boiling water will not destroy botulinum spores.
- Nasturtium seedsThe green seed pods of Tropaeolum majus, picked while soft enough that a fingernail marks them. They are edible and genuinely peppery, and the caper comparison is fair. The second method given here -- dropping pods into a standing jar of spiced vinegar as they ripen -- is the closer ancestor of how such pickles are made now, though a current tested recipe should be used for the vinegar strength and processing.
- BarberriesThe fruit of Berberis vulgaris, a sharply sour red berry once common in English and American hedgerows and used the way we now use cranberry or pomegranate seeds -- as a tart red garnish for cold meat. It largely disappeared from American cultivation after twentieth-century eradication campaigns targeting the shrub as an alternate host for wheat stem rust. Dried barberries are still sold in Persian groceries as zereshk.
- The double boilerCalled for here to hold the seeds and cold brine; the text does not say why, though gentle, even heating rather than scorching over a direct flame is the likely reason.
- "To Pickle Mushrooms"The text breaks off at this heading. Whatever followed is not on this page, and mushrooms in oil or weak brine are among the higher-risk home preserves in any case.
Household Discoveries belongs to the great American era of the home preserving manual, when a family that wanted pickles, relishes and garnishes through the winter had to make them, and when the whole enterprise rested on salt, vinegar, sugar and heat applied by feel. Both items here are frugality dishes rather than luxuries: nasturtium pods were a kitchen-garden substitute for imported capers, which were expensive and had to travel from the Mediterranean, and the practice is documented in English cookery writing well back into the eighteenth century. Barberries were the poor cook's decorative sour note, valued for a colour that held up on a cold-meat platter. What dates the page most sharply is not the ingredients but the assumption running through it -- that a preserve going mouldy is a setback to be corrected rather than a failure to be thrown out. The bacteriology that would overturn that assumption had already been worked out in laboratories some years before this book went to press, and it took another generation to reach the household manuals.