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Canned Pineapple
3 qts. pineapple, cut up 2½ pts. sugar Mrs. Mattie Swan. 2½ pts. water Mrs. J. E. Triggs.
Make a syrup of sugar and water. When it has boiled a few minutes add the pineapple and cook about five minutes. Seal at once. 1 qt. water
This is an open-kettle canning recipe: hot fruit into jars, lid on, no processing afterward. That method was standard in church cookbooks of this era and is no longer considered safe, so the notes below explain the gaps rather than bridge them.
- No processing step at all"Seal at once" means the jars are closed with only the heat of the syrup to sterilize them. Nothing in the recipe brings the sealed jar to a measured temperature for a measured time, which is the step that both destroys spoilage organisms and drives out enough air to form a reliable vacuum seal. A current tested recipe should be used instead.
- Why the seal is the problemOpen-kettle jars can seal weakly or fail weeks later. Pineapple is acidic enough that botulism is not the main concern; mold, yeast and lactic bacteria are, and a jar that looks sealed on the shelf can be fermenting inside. Unreliable seals, along with inadequate sterilisation, are why the method was dropped rather than adjusted.
- Vessels are unspecifiedAt the time this was printed, "seal" could mean a zinc lid with a rubber ring, a glass-top bail jar, or wax over a tumbler. None of these behave like a modern two-piece lid, and the recipe gives no headspace, so there is no way to follow it as written with current equipment.
- The stray line"1 qt. water" at the end does not belong to this recipe; it appears to be a line that has drifted in from adjacent text on the page. Ignore it.
- On the proportions themselvesTwo and a half pints of sugar to two and a half pints of water is roughly a heavy syrup by later USDA classification. Five minutes of cooking is about right for cut fresh pineapple, which softens quickly and turns fibrous and dull if held longer.
Fresh pineapple reached northern markets by rail as a seasonal luxury before commercial canned pineapple became a year-round staple; a housewife who found good fruit cheap put it up herself. The impulse behind the recipe is the same one behind every open-kettle fruit recipe in books like this: catch the glut, cover it in syrup, and shelve it. Church and society cookbooks such as this one were sold to raise money for the congregation, and their contents are a fair record of what the contributors actually cooked, including methods that later home-economics extension work would spend decades correcting.