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Cold-Pack Method
3. Pack the fruit as prepared directly into the jars or cans.... 4. Complete the filling of the cans with hot water, sugar syrup, or grape syrup. Jars should be warmed first to avoid cracking.
The fruit will keep equally well whichever liquid is used. The addition or the amount of sugar is a matter of taste. It can be added later when the fruit is used. The usual sugar syrup for apricots, peaches, plums and berries is made by dissolving 3½ pounds of sugar in a gallon of water. For apples, pears, quinces, prunes, and cherries 27/4 pounds of sugar to the gallon is sufficient. If neutral 65° grape syrup is used, from 5½ to 3½ pounds should be used per gallon of water. 5. Place the full cans or jars with loose covers on the false bottom in the wash boiler, adding water to about twothirds their height. With cans boiling water is best; with jars it should be simply warm. A second tier may be placed on a wooden rack resting on top of the first tier. 6. Place the cover on the boiler and heat to boiling. The boiling should continue for twenty minutes for apricots, free-stone peaches, plums, berries, apples and cherries. For pears, cling-stone peaches, and unripe fruits, thirty minutes are necessary to cook the fruit. 7. The tops of the jars should be screwed down tight while still boiling hot and placed upside down or lying down on a table to cool. Wax-top cans should be removed quickly and sealed while boiling hot.
This is a fragment of a general home-canning procedure from the era when a wash boiler and a wooden rack stood in for a purpose-built canner. The fruit itself is high-acid and therefore the least hazardous class of home-canned food, but the process described here falls short of current requirements at several points, and no part of it should be followed as printed.
- The jars are not submergedWater is added only to two-thirds the height of the jars, which turns the boiler into a partial steam bath rather than a boiling-water canner. Current practice requires jars to be covered by one to two inches of vigorously boiling water for the whole processing time so that heat penetrates to the cold centre of a raw-packed jar.
- Sealing by inversionThe text has the lids screwed down tight while boiling hot and the jars stood upside down or on their sides to cool; no reason is given. Inversion does not reliably sterilise the lid or prove the seal, and with modern two-piece lids it interferes with the vacuum that forms as the jar cools. Two-piece lids are also tightened only fingertip-tight before processing, not clamped down.
- No headspace givenThe instruction is simply to complete the filling with liquid. Without a stated headspace the jar may be overfilled, liquid is forced out past the lid during processing, and the seal fails. Every current fruit recipe specifies a measured headspace.
- Wax-top and solder-seam cansWax-top cans -- The wax-sealed tin cans referred to here are no longer made for domestic use and cannot be sealed safely in a home kitchen. Ignore that clause entirely.
- Processing times are not transferableThe twenty and thirty minutes given here assume this improvised set-up and make no allowance for jar size or for altitude. Boiling-water processing times must be taken from a current tested schedule, adjusted for elevation, and they differ for raw pack and hot pack.
- The syrup figuresThe printed page gives "27/4 pounds" for apples, pears, quinces, prunes and cherries; read it as 2¾ pounds to the gallon. The underlying principle holds: sugar is for flavour and texture, not preservation, and the text says the fruit will keep equally well whichever liquid is used.
- What to use insteadFor canned apricots, peaches, plums, pears, apples, cherries or berries, work from a current tested recipe with specified headspace, jar size, processing time and altitude adjustment. The historical text is worth reading for the method it describes, not for following.
The "cold pack" of this period simply meant packing raw, uncooked fruit into the jar and cooking it in the container, as against the hot pack in which fruit is heated in syrup first. The one-period boiling-water method spread through American households in the 1910s, promoted by state agricultural extension services, canning clubs and wartime food-conservation campaigns that urged families to put up garden and orchard surplus. The equipment described here is improvised: the wash boiler was the largest vessel in an ordinary kitchen, and the "false bottom" was a rack to keep glass off the hot metal. The confident, numbered tone is typical of the domestic-science movement.