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Canned Strawberries (For every quart of fresh)
For every quart of fresh strawberries, take one coffee-cup of white sugar; add a table-spoon or two of water to the fruit if there is no juice in the bottom, to prevent burning before the heat brings out the juice. As soon as the fruit boils, add the sugar, and stir gently for a few minutes until it boils up again, and can immediately. It is better not to cook any more fruit than can be put into one glass fruit-jar. Usually a few spoonfuls of the syrup will be left with which to begin the next can. Strawberries are considered difficult to keep, but there need be no trouble if the fruit is fresh and the can is closed air-tight in glass, and kept as directed in general directions for canning fruits. - Mrs. H. S. Huntington, Galesburg, Ill.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit ladled into a jar and sealed, with no processing after the jar is closed. Every current canning authority has abandoned the method, and the reasons apply directly to this recipe.
- No processing step at allThe fruit is boiled, packed and sealed, and that is the end of it. Nothing sterilises the inside of the jar rim, the lid or the headspace air after filling, so any mould spore or yeast that lands during the transfer is sealed in with a warm sugar syrup — close to ideal growing conditions.
- The seal is unverifiableA boiling-water process is what drives air out and pulls a true vacuum as the jar cools. Sealing hot fruit in a closed jar can produce a lid that looks sealed but holds only a weak partial vacuum. The recipe itself concedes that strawberries are "considered difficult to keep," and reassures the reader that "there need be no trouble" if the jar is closed air-tight.
- Period jar hardware"Glass fruit-jar" in this period most likely means a jar closed with a zinc screw cap or a lever clamp over a rubber ring, and such rings were generally renewed each season. Modern two-piece lids are designed to seal under heat processing and behave differently; the instruction does not transfer.
- Botulism is not the hazard here — spoilage isStrawberries are high-acid fruit, so Clostridium botulinum is not the concern. Mould, yeast and the mycotoxins some moulds produce are, and a jar that fails quietly in a cellar over the winter is not always obviously off when opened.
- No quantities that can be checkedThere is no jar size, no fill level, no headspace, no processing time and no temperature — nothing that could be verified even if the method were sound. "A coffee-cup" of sugar in this period is roughly a cup, but coffee cups varied from about six to eight ounces, so even the sugar ratio is approximate.
- If you want canned strawberriesUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify jar size, headspace and a boiling-water processing time. Strawberry jam and freezer methods are both well documented and reliable.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the great wave of American compiled cookbooks of the 1880s, in which recipes arrived by post from contributing housewives and were printed over their names and towns — among them Mrs. H. S. Huntington of Galesburg, Illinois, appearing in a book marketed to Southern kitchens. Home canning in glass had spread rapidly after the middle of the century with the arrival of the screw-top self-sealing jar, and cookbooks of this period devote long chapters to it because it was still a new and imperfectly understood domestic technology. Strawberries earned their reputation as "difficult to keep" honestly: they are soft, they give up little juice at first, and their delicate flavour is wrecked by long boiling — the advice here to can no more at a time than fills one jar is sound practice for texture, whatever its shortcomings for safety. The open-kettle method these recipes describe remained common in American homes well into the twentieth century before laboratory work on spoilage organisms pushed processing in a boiling-water bath into every extension-service bulletin.