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.
Home › Cookery › Recipe for Putting Up Fruit
Recipe for Putting Up Fruit
For fruit not very acid, weigh one-quarter of a pound white sugar to one pound fruit perfectly ripe. After sprinkling the fruit with sugar, put it in a preserving kettle and let it just come to a boil. Then put it quickly in glass self-sealing cans being careful to screw down the tops tightly.--Mrs. Dr.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit ladled into jars and sealed with no processing afterward. The method was standard in the nineteenth century and is no longer considered sound, so the notes below explain the vessels and the failure rather than offering a revised procedure.
- Why it failsNothing here sterilises the jar, the lid, the headspace air or the fruit at the top of the pack. "Just come to a boil" is a few seconds at 212F in the kettle only; the seal is formed by cooling steam, not by a measured heat process, and mould and yeast routinely survive to spoil the contents. Use a current tested water-bath recipe with a specified processing time for the fruit and jar size instead.
- The seal is unverifiableA screwed-down lid on hot fruit can form a vacuum that looks and sounds convincing while the jar was never heated through. There is no step in this recipe that lets you confirm the seal held for the right reason, which is precisely what a timed water bath supplies.
- "Fruit not very acid"The recipe names no fruits, and the phrase governs how much sugar to add rather than flagging a hazard. Less acid fruits such as figs, some pears and some peaches can sit near or above pH 4.6, and modern tested recipes call for added lemon juice or citric acid for several of them.
- Preserving kettleA wide pan kept for preserving; such kettles were often copper or brass, though lined and enamelled versions were also in use by this date. Copper reacts with acid fruit; any modern equivalent should be a heavy stainless or enamelled pan.
- Glass self-sealing cansLate-nineteenth-century jars with glass or zinc lids and rubber gaskets, tightened by hand. They are collector's items now, and the rubber rings they depended on are not made to any current standard. Two-piece modern lids behave differently and are not interchangeable with the instruction to "screw down the tops tightly."
- The sugar ratioFour ounces of sugar to a pound of fruit is a light pack, roughly a quarter by weight. At that level sugar is a flavour and texture agent only -- it holds the fruit firm and keeps the colour -- and contributes nothing meaningful to preservation. Preserves that keep on sugar alone run three or four times as strong.
Open-kettle putting up was the ordinary summer work of a Virginia household in the 1870s and 80s, when Housekeeping in Old Virginia (compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, 1878) gathered hundreds of such contributions from named and half-named neighbours -- here only "Mrs. Dr.", an evidently truncated attribution. The recipe's confidence rests on the then-new screw-top jar: patent self-sealing jars spread widely through American kitchens after the 1850s and 60s, and a brief scald and a tight lid seemed sufficient. Systematic testing of processing times came later, largely through state agricultural experiment stations and extension bulletins in the early twentieth century, which is why so many family canning traditions still carry this shape of instruction. The very light sugar ratio marks it as a plain fruit pack rather than a preserve, intended to be opened in winter and cooked or eaten as stewed fruit, and the distinction it draws between acid and non-acid fruit governs how much sugar to weigh out.