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Canned Huckleberries
Pick over and wash berries, then put in a preserving kettle with a small quantity of water to prevent berries from burning. Cook until soft, stirring occasionally, and put in jars. No sugar is required, but a sprinkling of salt is an agreeable addition.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit is ladled into jars and left to seal itself. The method was standard in 1896 and is no longer considered sound, so the notes below are about what the text assumes rather than how to carry it out.
- No processing step at allThe recipe ends at "put in jars." There is no sterilizing of jars, no lid or seal specified, no boiling-water bath and no processing time. Nothing in the procedure establishes that the sealed contents are safe from spoilage organisms, and nothing tells the cook how to know whether a seal formed.
- Open-kettle sealing failsOpen-kettle sealing is unreliable -- Hot fruit poured into a jar draws a partial vacuum as it cools, which is what Farmer is relying on. That vacuum is unreliable, and the headspace and jar rim can be recontaminated by air and by the ladle. Later canning authorities discouraged the method for exactly this reason.
- Salt instead of sugar removes a safeguardSalt instead of sugar -- Sugar at preserve concentrations binds water and slows microbial growth, though it is not what makes canned fruit safe. Here there is no sugar, and a sprinkling of salt does nothing at the quantities implied. The pack is simply cooked wet fruit in a jar.
- Acidity is assumed, not measuredHuckleberries are acidic, which is why this survived as long as it did, and why the failure mode is usually visible spoilage rather than botulism. But the recipe specifies no variety, no added acid and no check of any kind.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy pan, of enamelled or porcelain-lined iron, brass or copper, of generous capacity. Any wide heavy stockpot corresponds to it.
- Huckleberries and blueberriesNineteenth-century New England cookbooks use the two names loosely. True huckleberries (Gaylussacia) have ten hard seeds and a thicker skin; the blueberry of a modern market is a different genus (Vaccinium), and the cultivated highbush blueberry was not developed until the 1910s, well after this book was written.
- If you want canned berriesUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, with stated jar preparation, headspace and processing time for your altitude.
Huckleberries were a gathered crop rather than a bought one in the New England of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896): picked wild in late summer, in quantity, and dealt with quickly before they spoiled. That plausibly explains the recipe's brevity and its indifference to sugar, which cost money when the fruit did not. Canning without sugar produced a plain packed fruit suited to winter pies and puddings rather than a sweet preserve. The section it sits in reflects a moment when glass jars with rubber-ringed screw or clamp lids were widely available and inexpensive, but the science of processing had not caught up with them; the U.S. Department of Agriculture's canning bulletins, which established measured times and boiling-water baths for home use, came later.