Home › Canning and Preserving › Canned Apple Sauce
Canned Apple Sauce
Cut tart apples into eighths, removing cores. Put them in the preserving kettle with one cup of water for each quart apples. Cover, and let cook gently until tender. Press through a colander to remove skins. Re-heat in the preserving kettle, allowing onequarter cup sugar to each pint of apple sauce. Stir to prevent burning. Fill hot sterilized jars to overflowing and seal immediately. If desired, a pinch of cinnamon may be added with the sugar.
The cooking here is sound applesauce practice; the preservation method is not. What follows explains where the recipe fails as canning, and what its older terms mean.
- Open-kettle canningFilling hot jars with hot food and sealing, with no processing afterward, is the method this recipe uses and the one modern canning authorities abandoned decades ago. Nothing sterilizes the headspace, the underside of the lid, or the food itself once it is in the jar, and a seal formed by cooling steam alone is unreliable. Use current tested directions from a canning authority if you want shelf-stable applesauce.
- "Sterilized jars" is not the same as sterile contentsBoiling the empty jars addresses only the glass. Yeasts, moulds and spore-forming bacteria introduced during ladling and from the air survive in the sealed jar, and a jar that fails quietly can ferment or mould without an obvious bulge.
- The acidity is assumed, not measuredThe recipe specifies tart apples. Apples are generally acidic enough to count as a high-acid product, though sweeter modern dessert cultivars are less tart; in any case the recipe relies on that acidity rather than on any measured heat process.
- "Fill to overflowing"Period jars with glass lids and rubber rings were filled brim-full on purpose. Modern two-piece lids need measured headspace to vent and seat properly, so the instruction is actively wrong for the equipment in a present-day kitchen.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy pan meant for reducing fruit, with a lot of evaporative surface. Historically often unlined copper or brass; use stainless or enamelled cast iron, since bare copper reacts with fruit acid.
- Pressing through a colanderThis is a sieving step, not draining. A food mill with a coarse plate does the same job faster and keeps the pectin and colour that cooking the skins contributes.
- The sugar is for flavour onlyA quarter cup per pint is far too little to preserve anything. Treat it as seasoning, and do not imagine it is doing preservative work.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no yield; prepared apple eighths cook down considerably, and how much varies with the variety and juiciness of the fruit.
Mrs. Fryer's Loose Leaf Cook Book is generally attributed to Jane Eayre Fryer, better known for the Mary Frances children's instruction books, and its canning section belongs to the years when American households were being urged to put up their own fruit and vegetables rather than buy them. Apples were the obvious candidate: cheap by the peck in autumn, self-preserving to a degree because of their acidity, and forgiving of rough handling since the sauce is sieved anyway. The open-kettle method given here was common advice in domestic-science literature of the period; it survived in print long after commercial canners had moved to measured heat processing, and it was displaced from home kitchens only gradually as public-health and extension advice turned against it. The instruction to cook the apples with their skins on and sieve them afterwards is the part worth keeping — the skin carries both pectin and much of the colour that turns pale sauce faintly pink.