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Corn and Tomatoes
By mixing tomatoes with corn very little difficulty will be found in keeping. While corn ferments quickly alone, the acid of the tomatoes seems to assist in its preservation. Stew the tomatoes until a proper thickness, then add a sufficient quantity of corn, boil slowly about half an hour. Fill the jars to overflowing, seal as directed.
This is a home-canning procedure, not a salad, and it rests on an assumption about acidity that food science has since disproved. The instructions cannot be followed safely.
- The acidity claim is wrongTomatoes alone sit right at the borderline of safe acidity, around pH 4.6, and many modern cultivars fall above it. Adding sweet corn, which is strongly low-acid, pushes the mixture well into the range where Clostridium botulinum spores can germinate in a sealed, oxygen-free jar. The "acid of the tomatoes" does not preserve the corn.
- Boiling does not kill the sporesHalf an hour of slow boiling reaches 212F at most. Botulinum spores survive that indefinitely; destroying them in a low-acid vegetable mixture requires pressure processing at temperatures above the boiling point, held for a validated time. Nothing in this recipe achieves that.
- No quantities, no process time"A sufficient quantity of corn" and "seal as directed" give no ratio, no jar size, no processing time and no temperature. Even a fundamentally sound canning recipe cannot be reproduced safely without those numbers, and this one is not sound to begin with.
- Corn-and-tomato mixtures are a known hazardCorn-and-tomato mixtures fall under the low-acid rule -- home-canned corn is among the vegetables that recur in botulism cases traced to domestic preserving, and current guidance holds that tomatoes combined with any low-acid vegetable must be pressure canned rather than treated as an acid food.
- Open-kettle fillingFilling jars "to overflowing" and sealing them is the pattern of the open-kettle method, which seals the jar without sterilising the contents and is no longer considered acceptable for any vegetable. What "seal as directed" involved is set out elsewhere in the book, not here, so the full procedure cannot be judged from this page alone.
- If you want to put this upUse a current tested recipe from a national extension service or a modern preserving manual, with a pressure canner and its stated times. Freezing stewed corn and tomatoes is the simpler route and needs no calculation at all.
Corn was the awkward vegetable of nineteenth-century home preserving. It was notoriously difficult to keep in a jar, and cookbooks of the period record various workarounds: heavy salting, packing in layers with salt, sealing with wax or mutton fat, and blends like this one meant to borrow keeping power from a more acidic partner. The reasoning here is empirical rather than bacteriological — cooks had noticed that acidic foods kept better, and generalised from that without knowing why, since the role of heat-resistant spores in low-acid canned goods was not clearly understood in domestic practice until well into the twentieth century. That corn and tomatoes were paired at all reflects how the two grew together in American kitchen gardens and arrived at the same moment in late summer; the same pairing survives as succotash and as the stewed side dish, both eaten fresh rather than stored. Placing this entry under salads and dressings looks odd now.