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Canned Beans
1 qt. water. 1 C sugar. 2 qts. wax beans Scant C salt Boil well, water, sugar and salt, then add beans and boil three minutes more. Put in can and seal tight.
Mrs. Wm. Sage.
Juice 2 lemons
This is an open-kettle canning method for a low-acid vegetable, and it is the one category of old preserving recipe that modern food science rules out entirely. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a corrected procedure.
- Botulism is the whole problemGreen and wax beans are low-acid (pH around 5.5), which is exactly the range in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate in the oxygen-free environment of a sealed jar. Boiling water reaches 212F; the spores survive it and are only reliably destroyed at around 240F, which requires a pressure canner. No amount of time at a rolling boil substitutes.
- Three minutes is not a processing timeThe three-minute boil here cooks the beans briefly and nothing more. Even by the standards of water-bath processing it is a fraction of what would be needed, and water-bath processing is not appropriate for beans at any duration.
- Open-kettle sealingPacking hot food and sealing without a timed process in the closed jar was standard household practice for decades. It produces a seal, which is why it looked like it worked, but the seal traps whatever survived rather than sterilising the contents.
- The lemon juice does not acidify anythingThe stray line "Juice 2 lemons" at the end appears to have been set adrift in typesetting. Even if intended for the brine, the juice of two lemons cannot bring two quarts of beans plus liquid down to a safe pH, and acidification of vegetables is not a home-guesswork operation.
- Missing quantitiesNo amount is given for the water or the sugar, and "Scant C salt" means a scant cup — an enormous quantity that suggests a heavy brine, but the ratio is unrecoverable. A preserving recipe with unmeasured ingredients cannot be evaluated, let alone reproduced.
- Wax beansThese are simply yellow snap beans, the same vegetable as green beans with a recessive gene for pod colour. They are still widely sold in summer; the ingredient is not the issue.
- If you want canned beansUse a current tested procedure from a pressure-canning guide, or freeze the beans after blanching. Pickled dilly beans, with a measured vinegar brine, are the safe water-bath option in this family of recipes.
Church and society cookbooks of the early twentieth century are thick with recipes like this one, because putting up the summer garden was an unavoidable household task and the technology to do it safely was not yet common in home kitchens. Pressure canners existed commercially but were expensive and not widely used in home kitchens before the 1920s, so many cooks relied on hard boiling, heavy salt and a tight seal, and passed the method along by name — here Mrs. Wm. Sage's. Botulism was described in the nineteenth century (the name comes from botulus, Latin for sausage, after outbreaks traced to preserved meat), and the specific hazard of home-canned low-acid vegetables reached most home kitchens as federal and state extension services began issuing canning bulletins in the 1910s and 20s.