Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Canned Peaches Steamed
To peel, place in a wire basket, to the handle of which a cord has been tied, let down into boiling water for a moment, then into cold water, and strip off the skin (this saves both fruit and labor). The fruit must be at a certain stage to be prepared in this way, for if too green it will not peel, and if too ripe it will be too much softened by the hot water. After peeling, seed and place in a steamer over a kettle of boiling water, first laying a cloth in bottom of steamer; fill about half full of fruit, cover tightly, make a syrup in a porcelain kettle for fruit alone, let the fruit steam until it can be easily pierced with a silver fork, drop gently for a moment into the hot syrup, place in the cans, fill, cover, and seal. The above recipe is for canning a few at a time. This recipe, with the exception of mode of peeling, applies equally well to pears.
The peeling method here is sound and still standard, but the canning procedure is not: fruit is steamed, dipped in syrup, packed hot and sealed with no processing in the sealed jar at all.
- Open-kettle canning is the problemHot fruit sealed straight into jars with no timed processing after sealing is what used to be called open-kettle canning, and it has been off the table for decades. Nothing sterilises the jar rim, the lid or the headspace air, and nothing drives out the air that lets mould and yeast establish themselves.
- No time, no temperatureThe only doneness cue given is that the fruit can be pierced with a silver fork, which tells you about texture and nothing about heat penetration or seal. There is no processing time, no water level, no jar size and no altitude adjustment, so there is no way to make the method verifiable.
- Peaches are acid, so botulism is not the main hazardThe page's blanket warning is aimed at low-acid foods; peaches and pears sit low enough in pH that Clostridium botulinum is not the primary concern. The realistic failures are mould, spoilage yeasts and seals that appear to hold and then fail in storage — enough reason not to follow the method.
- The seals of the period were differentThe recipe says only "cover, and seal" and does not describe the closure; in this period that would most often have meant a zinc cap over a rubber ring, or a wax seal, on a jar made for it. Modern two-piece lids depend on a timed heat process to vent the jar and pull a vacuum as it cools, so the old sequence cannot simply be carried across.
- The syrup is unspecified"Make a syrup in a porcelain kettle for fruit alone" gives no sugar-to-water ratio and no quantity. Syrup strength is a matter of taste rather than safety with peaches, but it does mean the recipe cannot be scaled or reproduced as printed.
- If you want to can peachesUse a current tested procedure from a source such as the USDA or a state extension service, which will give jar size, headspace, pack style and a processing time in a boiling-water canner.
- Worth keeping: the peeling trickThe basket-and-cord blanch — a moment in boiling water, then straight into cold — is still the fastest way to skin peaches, and the caveat about ripeness is accurate. Underripe fruit will not slip its skin; overripe fruit turns to mush in the hot water.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the wave of late nineteenth-century American compilations that treated home canning as an ordinary summer chore, and its instructions read as if written for a cook already familiar with the jars on her shelf. Steaming rather than boiling has an obvious practical logic here: it is gentler on peach and pear halves than a rolling boil, and it lets the syrup be cooked separately and kept clear. The insistence on a porcelain-lined kettle reflects a real concern of the day, since acid fruit attacks bare iron and copper and picks up both metal and colour. What the recipe cannot supply is the thing nobody yet knew to ask for — a measured heat treatment after the jar is closed. That understanding arrived with the bacteriological work of the following decades and the extension-service processing tables of the twentieth century, which is why a page like this now reads as a record of practice rather than a set of directions.