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Plums
Stem and wash the plums, and to every pound of plums allow three-quarters of a pound of sugar. If the plums are large prick the skin to prevent their bursting. If green or yellow gages, it is best to remove the skins by scalding. Cover the fruit with the sugar and stand aside over night. This should be done in large meat plates or earthen dishes. In the morning put sufficient to fill two cans at a time, in a porcelain-lined kettle, bring to a boil, simmer until soft without breaking. Skim and can as directed. 4 pounds of peaches,
This is an open-kettle canning method: hot fruit is ladled into jars and sealed with no processing after filling. That step is the reason the recipe cannot be followed today, though several of its other terms are worth decoding.
- Why it fails: no heat process in the jarThe fruit is boiled in the kettle, then "canned as directed" — a cross-reference to instructions not given here, which on the usual pattern of the period means filled hot and sealed, with no boiling-water bath afterward. If so, nothing in the sequence heats the sealed jar, so the headspace, the underside of the lid and the jar rim are never brought to temperature, and the vacuum depends on cooling steam alone. Open-kettle canning was later abandoned by extension services because seals can fail silently and spoilage organisms can enter during filling.
- Why it fails: no times, no temperatures, no jar checkThere is no processing time, no jar or lid preparation, and no instruction to test the seal. Plums are high-acid fruit, so the danger is mould and yeast spoilage and fermentation rather than the botulism risk that attends low-acid vegetables — but there is no measured step here that would tell you whether a jar is safe a month later. Use a current tested recipe for canned plums if you want to put fruit up.
- The undertext is not a printer's error you should followThe line ends "4 pounds of peaches," mid-sentence. It appears to be the start of the next entry, carried over in setting. It is not part of the plum method and no quantity of peaches belongs in it.
- GagesGreen gage and yellow gage are small, round, intensely sweet dessert plums, still sold in late summer at farm markets under those names or as reine-claude. The recipe directs that they be skinned by scalding, but gives no reason for treating them differently from other plums.
- Porcelain-lined kettleAn enamelled cast-iron or steel pot. The point was to avoid bare iron, copper or tin, which discolour acid fruit and can give it a metallic taste. Any non-reactive pan answers today.
- The overnight sugaringThree-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of fruit, left to stand overnight, draws juice out osmotically so the plums cook in their own syrup and hold their shape. That part of the technique is sound and is still used for preserves and jam.
Fruit-canning entries like this one turn up throughout late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American household manuals. Home canning in glass jars with screw or clamp lids spread through American kitchens from the 1860s onward, and for decades the standard domestic practice was much what is described here: cook the fruit in a kettle, fill, seal, and trust the heat of the fruit. Only later, as state agricultural experiment stations and extension services began testing preserved food systematically in the 1910s and 1920s, was the sealed jar itself brought under heat and given a measured time. The greengage takes its English name from the Gage family of Suffolk, who are traditionally credited with introducing the French reine-claude plum to Britain in the early eighteenth century, the original label having been lost in transit.