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Preserved Fruit Juice
The juice of fruit may be kept for some time by putting it in tins the same as whole fruits. Mash the fruit, press it to extract as much of the juice as possible and then pass it through a fine hair-sieve. Measure the juice and put it in a pan with three pounds of preserving-sugar to each quart. Fill some jars with the syrup, cover them, stand them in a saucepan with cold water to three parts their height, and boil for half an hour. Leave the jars in the water until cool, then seal and put them away for use.
This is a home canning procedure, and the sealing step is the part that fails. The points below explain where the method departs from current practice rather than how to correct it.
- The jars are sealed after they coolBoiling covered jars and then leaving them in the water until cool means the seal is applied to cold, already-vented contents, so no vacuum forms and the headspace is exposed to room air during the hours of cooling. A modern water-bath process seals the jars before processing and relies on the vacuum drawn as they cool undisturbed.
- No acidity is established"The juice of fruit" covers everything from currants to melon and fig. Safe water-bath processing depends on the finished product sitting at pH 4.6 or below, and the recipe gives no way to know whether a given juice does. Low-acid juices processed this way are a botulism risk regardless of the sugar.
- Sugar is not a preservative hereSugar alone will not preserve this -- Three pounds of preserving sugar to the quart makes a very heavy syrup, and sugar at that level does suppress some spoilage, but the juice is not cooked down to jelly concentration and water activity stays high enough to allow osmophilic yeasts and moulds. The sugar cannot be relied on to make up for the sealing and acidity problems.
- "Tins the same as whole fruits"Commercial and home tinning of this era used soldered tinplate, and the solder was frequently lead. Nothing in the instruction distinguishes a sound container from an unsound one, and very few home kitchens today have the equipment to seam a can properly.
- Half an hour at an unmeasured temperatureHalf an hour with no defined pack -- The water reaches only three parts the height of the jars, so the upper portion is heated by steam and air rather than boiling water, and the recipe accounts for neither jar size nor altitude. Processing times in tested recipes are tied to a specific pack, jar volume and elevation.
- A hair sieveA fine sieve of woven horsehair was the standard fine strainer of the period. Fine-mesh nylon or several layers of damp cheesecloth do the same job, though straining is the only part of this procedure that transfers cleanly.
- If you want to put up juiceUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, or simply freeze the sweetened juice, which sidesteps the sealing question entirely.
Fruit syrups -- raspberry, currant, cherry -- were used for ices, sauces, punches and soda-fountain work, and keeping juice heavily sugared was one way of carrying that flavour through the year. Oscar Tschirky's cook book, published in 1896, sits at the point where household canning was becoming ordinary practice but the science lagged well behind. The distinction between high-acid and low-acid foods, the role of vacuum sealing, and the heat resistance of Clostridium botulinum spores were not understood in kitchen terms until well into the twentieth century, when American state extension services began publishing tested processing schedules. Instructions like these represent the best working knowledge of the 1890s, which is exactly why they should be read rather than followed.