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String Beans
String the beans, break them into inch lengths, pour over them boiling water and boil fifteen minutes. Have the jars ready filled with hot water thoroughly to heat them. Turn out the water and quickly fill the jars with the beans, adding as little as possible of the water in which they were boiled. Fill the cans until they are overflowing. Fasten on the tops and set away.
BEANS-Boil young string beans until quite tender. Then put them into cans, fasten down the tops and boil two hours. PEAS-Can in the same manner as beans. (See recipe above.)
This is open-kettle and boiling-water canning of a low-acid vegetable, the single most dangerous procedure in the old preserving chapters. It cannot be made safe by adjusting the times given here.
- Why green beans specificallyBeans have a pH around 5.5 and no acid, sugar or salt to inhibit growth. Clostridium botulinum spores survive boiling and germinate in exactly this environment: sealed, moist, oxygen-free, low-acid. Home-canned green beans have historically been among the most common vehicles for botulism in the United States.
- The first method has no processing at allFilling hot jars with hot beans and "setting away" relies on the food's own heat to sterilise the contents. It does not. The jar may seal convincingly while the interior never approaches spore-killing temperature.
- Two hours of boiling is not equivalentA boiling-water bath holds the contents at the boiling point of water (about 212F at sea level, lower with altitude), whatever the duration. Botulinum spores require temperatures in the region of 240F, which only pressure processing can reach. Long boiling degrades the beans without addressing the hazard.
- No headspace, no measured salt, no acidThe instruction to fill "until they are overflowing" leaves no headspace, which interferes with sealing and makes a failed seal harder to spot. There is no acidification and no measured salt, so nothing chemically limits growth.
- Toxin is invisibleSpoiled low-acid vegetables may look, smell and taste normal. There is no reliable domestic test, which is why the procedure itself has to be correct rather than the result inspected.
- If you want canned beansUse a current, tested pressure-canning procedure from a food-safety authority, with its own weights and times. Freezing blanched beans avoids the question entirely.
The Butterick Cook Book belongs to the period just before home canning was put on a scientific footing. The "open-kettle" method described here — hot food into hot jars, seal, walk away — was widely recommended in nineteenth-century household cookery books, carried over from an era when preserving meant fruit, pickles and jam, all of them protected by acid or sugar. Applying the same routine to string beans and peas looked like a natural extension and was in fact a leap into a category the technique could not handle. Domestic-science bulletins and extension services began pressing home cooks toward long "intermittent" boiling and then, from around the late 1910s onward, toward the pressure canner, as the bacteriology of low-acid spoilage was worked out; USDA guidance eventually made pressure processing the only accepted method for vegetables. Pages like this one are a useful reminder that a printed recipe carries the assumptions of its decade, and that some of those assumptions were later shown to be lethal.