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Tomato Soup (T salt Cook thoroughly)
3 T salt Cook thoroughly and strain.
Blend. 16 T sugar 14 T flour 14 T butter 4 saltspoons paprika Add to tomato soup and can while hot. ½ bu. ripe tomatoes ½ doz. ears corn 4 bunches carrots 6 bunches celery
This is a bulk canning recipe, and the method it assumes — filling jars with hot soup and sealing them, with no processing time, pressure or temperature given — is the one canning practice that current guidance rules out entirely. The notes below explain the units and then why the preservation step fails.
- The units"T" is tablespoon and "bu." is bushel; a bushel of tomatoes runs about 53 lb, so 1½ bushels is roughly 80 lb of fruit. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. The ingredient list and the method are also printed out of order here, with the seasonings appearing before the vegetables they season.
- Why this cannot be canned safelyCorn, carrots and celery are low-acid vegetables, and adding them to tomatoes raises the pH of the whole batch out of the range where acidity alone protects the jar. A low-acid mixture in a sealed jar is the classic environment for Clostridium botulinum to produce toxin, and no home recipe of this type can be made safe without a measured pressure-canning process.
- "Can while hot" is open-kettle canningPouring hot soup into jars and sealing them was once ordinary practice and is now specifically advised against. The soup never reaches a temperature that destroys botulinum spores, the seal is unreliable, and contamination from the jar rim and air is uncontrolled.
- No process is specified at allThere is no jar size, no processing time, and no indication of pressure or altitude adjustment. Even a recipe with the right ingredients cannot be followed safely without those numbers, and they cannot be guessed at from the text.
- The flour is a further problemThe thickening — 14 tablespoons of flour blended with butter — increases the density of the jar contents, which slows heat penetration to the centre. Flour-thickened mixtures are not used in tested home canning recipes for this reason.
- If you want this soupA tomato, corn, carrot and celery soup is worth making fresh, and freezing is an unproblematic way to keep a large batch. For anything sealed in jars, use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority.
The compression here is typical of community-cookbook printing: proportions are given rather than a procedure, and the two lists have run together. Canning soup mixtures in late summer, when a bushel of tomatoes and a dozen ears of corn cost almost nothing, was ordinary household economy, and the practice of filling and sealing jars straight from the kettle — open-kettle canning — was taught in cookbooks and extension pamphlets well into the 1920s. The shift away from it came with the spread of home pressure canners and, later, with USDA-tested processing schedules that established how long low-acid foods must be held at 240F. Recipes like this one are a good record of how much of home preservation used to rest on the cook's judgment rather than on a thermometer.