Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Frozen Dishes › Canning and Preserving
Canning and Preserving
CANNED fruits are now more popular with most people than preserved fruits.
The expense in preparing them is less, and the natural flavor is retained.
To prepare fruit for canning, look over carefully, reject imperfect fruit, and be sure that the fruit is clean. The fruit may be cooked in a saucepan with just enough sugar to make it palatable and water to keep the fruit from burning and transferred to sterile jars; or it may be put into steri rs in the first place, and cooked by steam, — the latter method preserves the color and flavor better. To sterilize jars, put jars into cold water, bring water to the boiling point, and boil ten minutes; fill jars with cooked fruit, and pour in syrup to overflowing; adjust rubbers and covers. Invert and let stand on folded cloth until cold; if there are no air bubbles, place jars in a cool dark closet to keep. If air bubbles are present, take off cover, reheat, and add more hot syrup and proceed as before. 4 pounds apples 1 pound sugar
This is a general method page for putting up fruit, closing with a bare ratio for apples. The method it describes — open-kettle filling with no processing of the sealed jar — was standard in 1907 and is no longer considered a safe way to preserve anything.
- Why the method failsThe fruit is cooked in a pan, ladled into jars that were boiled earlier, and sealed with no further heat treatment. Nothing sterilizes the inside of the filled, closed jar: the rim, the rubber ring, the underside of the lid and the headspace air are all recontaminated during filling. Modern practice processes the sealed jar in boiling water precisely because that step is what makes the pack shelf-stable.
- Inverting is not a seal testStanding the jars upside down on a cloth and looking for bubbles tells you only that the closure is roughly tight while hot. Cooling hot-filled contents may draw a partial vacuum, but the bubble check does not confirm it, and a jar that passes this test can still fail weeks later. The instruction to reopen, reheat and top up with syrup compounds the problem by exposing the contents again.
- Low-acid foods are the real dangerApples, and most fruit, are acidic enough that Clostridium botulinum will not grow; the likely spoilage there is mold and yeast. The hazard is that this page presents a single method for canning generally, and applied to beans, corn, greens, meat or tomatoes of unknown acidity, an unprocessed sealed jar held at room temperature is exactly the anaerobic, low-acid environment in which botulinum toxin forms.
- "Steri rs"A typesetting casualty in the original: the phrase is "sterile jars." The sentence contrasts cooking fruit in a saucepan first against packing it raw into jars and cooking it by steam.
- The rubbersJars of this period used a separate flat rubber ring under a glass or zinc lid held by a wire bail or screw band. Rubbers were single-use and perished with age, and a hardened ring was a common cause of silent failure. Modern two-piece lids work differently and are not interchangeable with this procedure.
- The apple ratioFour pounds of apples to one pound of sugar is the sweetening proportion only — roughly a quarter sugar by weight, on the light side, which is consistent with the book's point that canned fruit keeps its natural flavor. No water quantity, jar count or cooking time is given; the only timing on the page is the ten minutes' boiling to sterilize the empty jars.
- What to use insteadFor putting up fruit at home, follow a current USDA or Extension Service tested procedure, which will specify headspace, processing time and altitude adjustment. Nothing on this page supplies those numbers.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it ranges well beyond its sponsor's product into the full run of household work. Home canning was then in a confident middle period: the self-sealing glass jar, generally traced to John Landis Mason's 1858 patent, had made putting up fruit ordinary in American kitchens, and the author's remark that canned fruit had overtaken preserves reflects a real shift away from the heavy sugar-to-fruit ratios that had been the only reliable safeguard before airtight closures. What had not yet arrived was the understanding of what actually makes a sealed jar safe. Botulism was identified in the nineteenth century, but the link to improperly processed home-canned goods was not widely established or communicated to home cooks until the 1920s, after which pressure canning and measured boiling-water processing entered the standard advice. Pages like this one show the technique at its most self-assured and least protected.