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Canned Pineapple
Select ripe fruit; pare and remove the eyes; slice them in halfinch slices and cut each slice into quarters. Fill the jars with fruit, within an inch of the top. Make a syrup of sugar and water in the proportion of a cup of sugar to a pint of water; fill the jars with this up to the top and process by the cold-pack method. See time-table for length of period of sterilization.
Pineapple is an acid fruit and belongs in the small group that home canners can still process safely — but this entry gives no processing time at all, referring instead to a time-table printed elsewhere in the book, and the cold-pack timings of this era were set before modern testing of heat penetration in packed jars.
- The missing time-tableThe elements that determine safety here — minutes of processing, jar size — sit in a table that is not on this page. A canning procedure with the process time removed is not a usable procedure. Use a current tested recipe for canned pineapple instead.
- What "cold-pack" meantCold pack, also called raw pack, means the uncooked fruit goes into the jar and the whole thing is heated in a boiling-water bath. The term does not mean the jars stayed cold. Period tables for cold-pack fruit often ran short by present standards, and typically gave no altitude adjustment.
- ClosuresThe jars of the period sealed with a rubber ring under a glass or zinc lid, tightened after processing. Modern two-piece lids seal by a different mechanism and are not interchangeable with these instructions.
- The syrupOne cup sugar to one pint water works out to roughly 30 percent sugar by weight, a light-to-medium syrup. Syrup strength affects texture and colour but contributes nothing to preservation; it is not a safety factor and never was.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a pineapple of ordinary size, pared and cored, fills roughly one pint jar packed in quarter-slices.
- CoringThe recipe removes the eyes but says nothing about the core. Half-inch slices quartered will each carry a wedge of fibrous centre unless it is cut out, which is standard practice now.
Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the wave of American cookery published around the First World War, when home canning was promoted as a patriotic duty and the cold-pack method was pushed hard by extension agents and the National War Garden Commission as the simplest technique an untrained household could follow. That pineapple appears at all is a mark of the period: the fruit had become familiar enough to American cooks that a recipe could reasonably tell a household to select ripe fruit and pare it herself.