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Canned Plums
4 quarts plums. 1 cup water 1 quart sugar Wash, drain and prick the plums. Make a syrup of the sugar and water; put part of the fruit in the boiling syrup; cook five minutes; fill and seal the jars. Put more fruit in the syrup; remove and continue the process until all the fruit has been cooked.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit ladled into jars and sealed with no processing afterward. That method was standard in home kitchens for generations and has been rejected by every current canning authority. The page also carries some printer's confusion worth pointing out.
- No processing step at allThe jars are filled and sealed straight from the kettle, with nothing done to them afterward. Nothing sterilises the headspace, the jar rim or the underside of the lid, and there is no way to know whether a vacuum seal actually formed. Modern practice requires a measured boiling-water process for fruit in jars, and a recipe that omits it cannot be corrected by guesswork.
- The seal is the whole problemA lid that appears to pull down as the jar cools may be held by nothing more than contraction of hot air. Such seals fail weeks later in storage, admitting the yeasts and moulds that ferment or fur over home-canned fruit. Any current tested recipe from a food-preservation extension service should be used instead.
- Missing quantity of plumsThe ingredient list gives only water and sugar. No quantity of plums appears in the text as it stands, and there is no way to reconstruct the syrup-to-fruit ratio.
- The stray "8 quarts peaches"That line does not belong to this recipe and appears to be the opening of a neighbouring one. The book was issued in loose-leaf form, as punched sheets for a binder, which may account for a stray ingredient line surviving at the foot of the page.
- A quart of sugarSugar was measured by volume in this period. A quart of granulated sugar is four cups, roughly 800 g, against a single cup of water -- a very heavy syrup that would need constant watching to keep from scorching before the fruit went in.
- Pricking the plumsThe one instruction here that still holds. Whole plums burst and shed their skins in hot syrup unless the skin is pierced first, which lets steam escape and helps the syrup penetrate.
Plums were, by many accounts, among the fruits most often canned in the American household year because they need no peeling, keep their shape, and carry enough acid to be forgiving of imperfect technique -- which is exactly why open-kettle canning survived as long as it did with fruit long after it had been abandoned for vegetables and meat. Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the loose-leaf era of the early twentieth century, when publishers sold cookbooks as punched sheets in a binder so a cook could add her own cards and rearrange the sections; the format may well account for both the terse, telegraphic style of entries like this one and the stray line of a neighbouring recipe caught at the foot of the page. The batch-and-repeat method described -- cooking the fruit through in relays in a single kettle of syrup -- seems to have been a common way to work through a bushel bought cheap at the height of the season, before pressure canners and tested processing tables reached ordinary kitchens.