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Canned Sweet Red Peppers
Wash outside of peppers thoroughly and wipe dry. Cut slice from stem end and remove seeds. Cut into thin strips with the scissors, or into long ribbons, working around and around the pepper. Scald well and then drop into ice water to make crisp. Drain well. Make a syrup of two cups of sugar and one of vinegar. Put peppers into jars, fill to over-flowing with hot syrup, cover and keep in a cold place. These are effective to use in garnishing salads, cold meats, etc. See chapter on Garnishes.
This is a canning recipe from an era before the acidity of a pickle was understood as a measurable safety threshold, and it cannot be recommended as written. The notes below explain where it goes wrong rather than how to rescue it.
- Peppers are a low-acid vegetableSweet peppers sit around pH 5, well above the 4.6 threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. Any pepper preserve stored outside the refrigerator depends entirely on added acid to bring the whole jar, including the interior of the pepper strips, down into the safe range.
- The syrup is not acidic enoughTwo cups of sugar to one of vinegar is a sweet syrup with a little vinegar in it. Once that is diluted further by the water in the scalded peppers and by the ice-water rinse, the finished jar's acidity is unknown and almost certainly insufficient. The recipe also does not state the strength of the vinegar, which at the time was not standardised the way 5 percent acidity is today.
- No heat processing at allThe jars are filled with hot syrup, covered, and set aside. There is no boiling-water bath, no pressure processing, no time and no temperature. Hot syrup poured into a jar does not sterilise the contents or produce a reliable vacuum seal; it produces a warm jar that cools slowly, which is close to ideal for spore germination in a low-acid food.
- "A cold place" is not refrigerationIn a house with a cellar or a cold pantry this meant perhaps 45-55F, and often warmer in summer. Botulinum toxin can form at temperatures well below that of a modern kitchen, and the anaerobic interior of a sealed jar is exactly the environment it requires.
- The spoilage may be invisibleUnlike mould or yeast, botulism gives no reliable warning in a sweet-sour jar. Bulging lids and off odours are sometimes present and sometimes not, so tasting to check is not a test.
- If you want the resultMarinated red pepper ribbons for garnishing are worth making. Use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify vinegar strength, acid ratio and processing time, or treat them as a refrigerator pickle eaten within a couple of weeks.
- The scald-and-shock stepThe one piece of technique here that still holds is blanching the strips and dropping them into ice water. The recipe's own reason for the ice water is to make the strips crisp, and the cold shock does firm them after the scald.
Sweet red peppers may well have been, in the early 1900s, still a slightly decorative ingredient in Anglo-American cooking rather than a staple — at least this entry treats them accordingly: the payoff is not a dish but a garnish, cut in long ribbons wound around the pepper with scissors and kept in a jar to brighten a plate of cold meat. The Butterick Publishing Company came to cookbooks by way of dress patterns and The Delineator, and its domestic advice carries the same eye for presentation, hence the cross-reference to a whole chapter on garnishes. The recipe also belongs to a specific moment in home preserving. Glass jars with screw-band or wire-bail closures had made putting food by seem straightforward, but the science of acidity and heat penetration was still being worked out in agricultural experiment stations, and standardised processing times for home canners did not reach the general public in force until the government bulletins of the 1910s and 1920s. Recipes like this one, which trust hot syrup and a cold cellar to do the work, are a fair record of what careful cooks believed was sufficient before that guidance arrived.