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.
In addition, this page gives advice for salvaging or disguising food that has begun to spoil. Spoiled food can carry dangerous bacteria and toxins that no washing, soaking, or seasoning removes; it should be discarded.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Preservation of Food, Potichomania, Etc
was strained and put into quart bottles; these hav- | wash is improved by a mixture of very fine sanding been carefully corked, were put into a pan of cold water, which was then by degrees raised to the boiling point. At that temperature it was kept for half an hour, and was then allowed to cool down to the temperature of the air. After being bottled for 8 months the juice was in the state of a whitish, turbid liquor, with the acidity and much of the flavor of the lime; nor did it appear to have undergone any alteration. Some of the juice, which had been examined the year before, and which had since only been again heated and carefully bottled, was still in good condition, retaining much of the flavor of the recent juice. Hence it appears that, by the application of the above process, the addition of rum or other spirit to lime or lemon-juice, may be avoided, without rendering it at all more liable to spontaneous alteration.
To Preserve Milk.
Provide bottles, which must be perfectly clean, sweet, and dry. Draw the milk from the cow into the bottles, and, as they are filled, immediately cork them well up, and fasten the corks with pack-thread or wire. Then spread a little straw on the bottom of a boiler, on which place the bottles with straw between them, until the boiler contains a sufficient quantity. Fill it up with cold water; heat the water, and as soon as it begins to boil draw the fire, and let the whole gradually cool.
When quite cold take out the bottles, and pack them with straw or saw-dust in hampers, and stow them in the coolest part of the house or ship. Milk preserved in this manner, although 18 months in the bottles, will be as sweet as when first milked from the cow.
To Preserve Cabbages and other Esculent Vegetables Fresh during a Sea Voyage or a Severe Winter.
Cut the cabbage so as to leave about 2 inches or more of the stem attached to it; after which scoop out the pith to about the depth of 1 inch, taking care not to wound or bruise the rind by the operation. Suspend the cabbage by means of a cord tied around the stem, so that that portion of it from which the pith is taken remains uppermost, which regularly fill every morning with fresh water. By this simple method cabbages, cauliflowers, brocoli, etc. may be preserved fresh during a long voyage, or in a severe winter, for domestic use.
Fish-House (State of Schuylkill) Punch.
One-third pt. of lemon-juice, lb. white sugar, pt. peach brandy, pint cogniac brandy, pt.
Jamaica rum, no water, but a large lump of ice.
To Whitewash.
Put some lumps of quicklime into a bucket of cold water, and stir it about till dissolved and mixed, after which a brush with a large head, and a long handle, to reach the ceiling of the room, is used to spread it thinly on the walls, etc. When dry, it is beautifully white, but its known cheapness has induced the plasterers to substitute a mixture of glue size and whiting for the houses of their opulent customers; and this, when once used, precludes the employment of limewashing ever after, for the latter, when laid on whiting, becomes yellow. Whitewashing is an admirable manner of renas much as will mix and can be applied. Third. For inside walls an addition of a little glue-say lb. to 3 pailfuls - increases the adhesion. If it is desired to have the walls very white, the whites of eggs may be used in the place of the glue.
To Prevent the Smoking of a Lamp.
Soak the wick in strong vinegar, and dry it well and pleasant, and give much satisfaction for the before you use it; it will then burn both sweet trifling trouble in preparing it.
Easy Method of Preserving Meat in the Country, for a Few Days, without Salt and without Ice.
Put the meat into the water running from a spring. It will sink-examine it daily-when it begins to rise from the bottom it must be used; it will be found perfectly sound and tender, and may be boiled or roasted. Meat may be preserved in this manner 3 or 4 days in summer-time, free from taint. The outside will appear somewhat whitened, but the flavor is not injured. It would be advisable to have a box or tub, with a cover, into and out of which the water shall have free passage, which may be put either inside or outside of the spring-house.
Ready Mode of Mending Cracks in Stoves, Pipes, and Iron Ovens, as Practised in Germany.
When a crack is discovered in a stove, through which the fire or smoke penetrates, the aperture may be completely closed in a moment with a composition consisting of wood-ashes and common salt, made up into paste with a little water, and plastered over the crack. The good effect is equally certain, whether the stove, etc., be cold or hot.
This page collects several unrelated household receipts, only some of which concern food. Two of the preservation methods are genuinely dangerous by current understanding, and the one drink recipe has lost its measurements.
- Bottled milk is the serious hazardRaw milk sealed in corked bottles and brought just to a boil once, then stored eighteen months at ambient temperature, is textbook low-acid home canning without a validated process. Milk has no acidity to inhibit Clostridium botulinum, and the spores survive boiling; a corked bottle is exactly the oxygen-free environment in which they produce toxin. Nothing about this method can be salvaged by lengthening the time.
- Meat in a springSpring water in summer is nowhere near refrigeration temperature, and the water itself may carry Cryptosporidium, Giardia or coliform bacteria from upstream livestock. The author's own test for spoilage is the meat floating, meaning gas from bacterial action is already present. Use a refrigerator.
- Lime and lemon juiceThe bottled-juice paragraph at the head of the page is the least objectionable of the three, since citrus juice is acidic enough to resist botulism; the text reports the juice still sound after eight months in the bottle. Even so, the process as given (quart bottles, half an hour at boiling, no headspace stated) is not a validated one. Any modern canning guide for citrus juice will give a tested time and headspace.
- The punch has lost its numbersFish House Punch as printed here reads "lb. white sugar," "pt. peach brandy," "pt. Jamaica rum" with no quantities attached to most of the spirits. As it stands the proportions cannot be reconstructed from the text; consult a documented version rather than guessing.
- Quicklime is not a food operationThe whitewash receipt sits in the middle of the food entries but belongs to the building trades. Calcium oxide slaking in water generates heat and a strongly caustic solution that burns skin and eyes. It shares nothing with the kitchen but the bucket.
- The cabbage method is sound enoughHollowing the stem and keeping it filled with fresh water is simply keeping a cut vegetable hydrated, and it does slow wilting. It preserves nothing in the microbiological sense, and "brocoli" is broccoli.
- UnitsA pint here is the US 16 fl oz measure unless the book is following British practice, in which case it is 20; 'one-third pt.' of lemon juice is therefore about 5 fl oz by the US measure and nearly 7 by the imperial. A gill is 4 fl oz, or half a cup.
Most of this page belongs to the decades before Pasteur, when preserving food was an empirical art practised chiefly for ships. Nicolas Appert's heat-and-seal method, published in 1810, spread quickly through household manuals in exactly this form -- bottles bedded in straw, water raised to a boil, fire drawn, everything left to cool in place -- and compilers reprinted it for milk, juice and meat alike without any means of knowing which foods it actually protected. The lime-juice experiment reflects a related naval concern: citrus juice was the standard antiscorbutic for crews, and it was normally fortified with rum to keep it, so a method that avoided the spirit was of real interest to victuallers. The punch is the odd guest here. Fish House Punch is generally traced to the State in Schuylkill, a Philadelphia fishing and social club founded in 1732, and its appearance on a page headed "Preservation of Food, Potichomania, Etc" says more about how these ten-thousand-receipt compendiums were assembled -- clipped, pasted and crowded onto the page -- than about any connection between drink-mixing and food preservation.