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Peaches
4 pounds of peaches, 1 pound of sugar, 1 quart of water.
Pare the peaches, remove the stones, drop each half at once into cold water to prevent discoloration. Put the sugar and water in a porcelain-lined kettle, stand over the fire and stir continually until the sugar dissolves, boil and skim. Drain the peaches, drop them into the syrup, bring them quickly to the boil and then cook slowly until tender. Lift each piece carefully and arrange neatly in a jar. Then fill the jars quickly to overflowing. Seal and stand aside to cool.
Can pears in precisely the same way.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit ladled into jars, sealed, and left to cool with no further processing. It was standard practice for a century and is no longer considered sound, so the notes below explain the failure rather than offering a revised method.
- No heat process after sealingThe jars are filled and closed with nothing but the residual heat of the syrup. Nothing in the procedure holds the sealed jar at a temperature that destroys mold spores, yeasts or heat-resistant fungi introduced when the fruit is lifted piece by piece and arranged by hand. A current tested recipe, with a measured boiling-water process timed for jar size and altitude, should be used instead.
- Why the risk here is spoilage, not botulismPeaches and pears are acidic enough that Clostridium botulinum is not the concern it would be with beans or corn. The concern is fermentation and mold growth from an unsterile, unprocessed pack, and molds such as Byssochlamys survive brief heating and can grow in sealed fruit jars.
- The seal itself is unreliable"Seal and stand aside to cool" tells us nothing about the closure, which in a book of this date would most likely have been a zinc cap with a rubber ring. Modern two-piece lids are designed to vent air during a timed heat process and then draw down; a lid tightened onto a hot jar with no processing may appear sealed while trapping air and unpasteurised headspace.
- Handling after cookingEvery piece is cooked, then lifted, then arranged, then covered with syrup. Each transfer reintroduces contamination after the only heating step, which is precisely the sequence that a post-fill process is meant to correct.
- If you want the fruit, not the jarsThe syrup and cooking method are sound as a dish for immediate use: 1 lb sugar to 1 quart water is a light-to-medium syrup, and peach halves poached slowly until just tender are good served warm or chilled within a few days under refrigeration.
- Vessels and termsA porcelain-lined kettle means enamelled iron, specified because bare iron and copper discolour pale fruit and react with acid; any nonreactive pan does the same job. The cold-water bath for the pared halves is to slow enzymatic browning, and it still works.
Recipes like this one belong to the era when "canning" at home meant the open-kettle method: cook the food, pack it boiling hot, close the jar and trust the heat of the contents. Glass jars with reusable rubber-ringed closures made the practice possible from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and peaches and pears were the classic subjects, being cheap in season, quick to ripen past use, and acidic enough that the method usually worked. Bacteriology eventually caught up with it: agricultural extension services through the twentieth century moved home preservers to timed boiling-water processing for fruits and pressure processing for low-acid foods, and open-kettle packing was withdrawn from official advice.