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Canned Apples and Pineapple
4 pounds apples 4 pounds pineapple rind of 4 lemons 2 pounds sugar 2 pints water Pare, core, and cut the apples in rings. Cut pineapple in slices, remove skin and eyes, and cut pulp into squares, being careful to reject the core. Boil sugar and water five minutes; add pineapple; cook until tender; then cook apples until tender; add lemon rind; fill jars which have been sterilized with apple and pineapple, adjust rings, fill jars with syrup, adjust covers, seal.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit and syrup are ladled into jars and sealed with no processing afterward. The method was standard in 1907 and is no longer considered safe, so the notes below explain the terms and the failure points rather than adapting the procedure.
- No heat processing at allThe recipe ends at "seal" — there is no boiling-water bath, no time, no temperature. Sealing hot jars and letting them cool relies on residual heat alone, which does not reliably destroy the molds, yeasts and heat-resistant spoilage organisms introduced from the fruit, the ladle, the jar rims and the air. A current tested recipe with a measured processing time should be used instead.
- The seal itself is unverifiedOpen-kettle jars often appear sealed and are not. Without the vacuum produced by processing and cooling under a lid, a weak seal can hold for weeks and then admit air, and there is no step here that tests or confirms it.
- Sterilized jars are not the safeguard they seemSterilizing the empty jars addresses only the glass. The fruit, syrup, utensils and headspace air are all recontamination routes, and nothing in the sequence brings the filled, closed jar back up to temperature.
- No headspace specified"Fill jars with syrup" gives no room for expansion. Overfilled jars are a common cause of failure in this style of canning, the contents working past the gasket as they settle and contract.
- "Adjust rings" means rubber gasketsIn 1907 this refers to the flat rubber ring used with a glass-lidded lightning or bail-wire jar, or with a zinc screw cap. It does not mean the metal screw band of a modern two-piece lid, and the two systems behave quite differently.
- Pineapple "eyes"The eyes are the woody remnants of the individual fruitlets, left set into the flesh once the rind is pared away. Removing them, plus rejecting the fibrous core, means 4 pounds of untrimmed pineapple yields appreciably less usable pulp than the weight suggests.
- Lemon rindRind here means the peel of the lemon, added late as a flavoring and a source of aromatic oil rather than for acidity. Its contribution to the pH of the pack is negligible and cannot be counted on.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it padded out its confectionery chapters with a full general household course, preserving included. A pineapple-and-apple pack of this kind reflects a particular moment in American fruit supply: refrigerated steamship cargoes had made fresh pineapple from Cuba and the Bahamas a seasonal city-market commodity rather than a luxury, while apples were the cheapest and most abundant fruit in the Northeast, so combining the two stretched the expensive fruit through the domestic barrel fruit. The open-kettle method the recipe assumes was the ordinary home practice of the period; systematic processing times for water-bath and pressure canning were worked out by state agricultural experiment stations and the federal extension services over the following two decades, largely through the wartime home-canning campaigns of 1917-18, and it is those later standards that make this text a historical document rather than a working procedure.