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Canned Raspberries
2 pounds sugar Arrange berries and sugar in alternate layers in glass jars; set jars on trivet in large boiler two thirds full of water; cover and cook until the water in boiler boils vigorously. Remove jar; if berries have settled, refill from another jar, and seal.
This is a boiling-water-bath method for putting up raspberries, written before processing times were standardised. Read it as a document of how preserving was done around 1900 rather than as instructions to follow.
- No processing time is givenThe direction is to heat only "until the water in boiler boils vigorously" — that is the point at which a modern process would begin timing, not end. Nothing here ensures the contents of the jar reach and hold a temperature that destroys the moulds, yeasts and heat-resistant spoilage organisms that survive in fruit.
- The jar is opened after processingRemoving the jar, topping it up from a second jar, and only then sealing reintroduces everything the heating was meant to eliminate, and does it at the moment the contents are cooling and drawing air inward. This step alone invalidates the process.
- No quantity of fruitThe ingredient line survives as "2 pounds sugar" with no weight of berries and no number of jars. Layering fruit and sugar dry, with no added liquid, also means the amount of syrup formed depends entirely on how juicy the berries happen to be — there is no way to reconstruct the intended proportions.
- Why raspberries are still not a free passRaspberries are acidic enough that Clostridium botulinum is not the primary concern, which is why this method appeared to work often enough to be printed. The realistic failure is fermentation and mould growth in an under-processed, imperfectly sealed jar, including moulds that can raise the pH of the contents over time.
- Vessels and hardwareThe "large boiler" is a deep wash boiler or stockpot, and the trivet is a rack keeping glass off direct heat. Jars of this period sealed with rubber rings under zinc screw caps or under glass lids with wire bails, which behave differently from modern two-piece lids and cannot be evaluated by the same "did it pop" test.
- If you want canned raspberriesUse a current tested recipe from a reliable preserving authority, with a measured processing time for your jar size and altitude.
Lowney's treated preserving as a routine chapter of household work rather than a specialised skill, and its instructions reflect the state of knowledge at the time: heat the jars in water until it boils, then seal. Processing times keyed to jar size, food acidity and altitude came out of agricultural-college and USDA extension work over the following decades, and the older "cook until it boils" formula was steadily replaced. The dry layering of fruit with sugar and no water is a genuinely old technique — the sugar draws juice out of the berries to make its own syrup, which keeps the fruit firmer than fruit packed in added syrup. Raspberries were a natural candidate for putting up in glass, since they are too soft to travel or store fresh and their season is brief.<br>The book's association with the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, explains its heavy chocolate content elsewhere.