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Lima Beans
Shell the Limas and fill the jars full of them, add cold water to the jars and finish the same as the preceding recipe. Peas can be canned in the same way, or according to a formula given below.
ASPARAGUS-Pack the vegetable in the jars, leaving all the tips at the mouth of the jars. Add cold water and finish as in tomatoes (whole). cob and pack it in the jars until Place in the boiler the same as Fill to overflowing with boiling CORN-Cut the corn from the they are full, adding no water. directed and boil three hours. water, fasten the tops and set away.
CORN (Another Method) - Boil the corn in the ears five minutes. Then cut it from the cobs, pack the jars to within an inch of the top, and fill the rest with water. Put on the tops and screw partly down. Put the jars in water and boil two hours. Then screw the tops down tightly. Corn canned in this way is said to keep perfectly.
This entry covers boiling-water canning of shelled limas, peas, asparagus and corn. All four are low-acid vegetables, and the method described is the one that modern food-safety work specifically ruled out.
- Why it fails: Clostridium botulinumLimas, peas, corn and asparagus all sit well above pH 4.6. Boiling water reaches only 212F, which kills vegetative cells but not botulinum spores, and a sealed jar of low-acid vegetables is precisely the oxygen-free, low-acid environment in which those spores germinate and produce toxin. No length of boiling-water processing corrects this; three hours at 212F is still 212F.
- Corn is the worst caseCut corn packed tight with no added water, or packed to within an inch of the top, forms a dense mass that heat penetrates very slowly. The cold spot at the centre of the jar may never approach the temperature of the surrounding water, which is already insufficient.
- "Said to keep perfectly" is not a safety testBotulinum toxin does not swell every jar, cloud the brine or smell. A jar that looks and smells sound can be lethal. Period writers had no test for spoilage beyond what they could see and smell, which is one reason claims like this passed into print.
- "Finish the same as the preceding recipe"The instructions are incomplete on their own and depend on a method given elsewhere in the book, which the page does not reproduce. The asparagus is explicitly sent to the whole-tomato method; tomatoes are acid and behave differently, so carrying their timing over to low-acid vegetables compounds the error.
- Partly screwed topsThe "screw partly down, then tighten after boiling" sequence belongs to the screw-cap glass jars of the period; the recipe does not say which closure is meant. Modern two-piece lids seal on a different principle and are not interchangeable with these directions.
- If you want canned limas or cornLow-acid vegetables require a tested pressure-canning schedule from a current authority. Use one of those rather than adapting anything here.
The Butterick Cook Book appeared in the era when glass jars with screw caps had become cheap enough for ordinary households, and home canning was promoted heavily as thrift: a garden row of limas or a glut of sweet corn could be carried into winter without a root cellar or a smokehouse. What the period lacked was any understanding of spore-forming anaerobes. Botulism had been described in Europe from sausage poisoning in the nineteenth century, and the organism was identified in the 1890s, but the bacteriological work that established time-and-temperature schedules for low-acid vegetables came later, and pressure canners only reached home kitchens gradually through the 1910s and 1920s. Directions like these, offered in good faith and repeated from book to book, are the reason United States extension services spent decades publishing corrected schedules and warning against boiling-water processing of beans, peas, corn and asparagus.