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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Plain Canned Berries
Pick out stems or hulls if any-if gathered carefully the berries will not need washing, put in porcelain kettle on the stove, adding a small tea-cup water to prevent burning at first. When they come to a boil, skim well, add sugar to taste (for pies it may be omitted), let boil five minutes, fill in glass, stone, or tin cans, and seal with putty unless self-sealers are used. This rule applies to raspberries, blackberries, currants, gooseberries, or any of the small berries.
This is open-kettle canning: fruit is boiled, ladled hot into containers, and sealed with no processing afterward. Berries are acidic enough that botulism is an unlikely outcome, but the sealing methods described here are the real problem, and the method as a whole was abandoned by food-safety authorities generations ago.
- Why the method failsNothing here sterilizes the container or the seal, and nothing forces out the air trapped in the headspace. Hot fruit poured into an unprocessed jar may pull a partial vacuum on cooling or may not, and there is no way to verify it. Mold and yeast spoilage was a recognized hazard of open-kettle fruit.
- Putty sealsSealing with putty meant a cement of some kind, whether glazier's putty of whiting and linseed oil or a resin-and-wax compound, pressed around a tin lid or a stoneware crock cover. It is not a reliable gas-tight barrier over months, it cannot be inspected, and modern putties are not intended for food contact.
- Tin cans at homeHome canning in tin in the nineteenth century usually meant cans closed by a tinsmith with solder, or else sealed with a wax or putty cement as here; solder of the period was typically lead-bearing, and lead migrates readily into acidic fruit. That risk alone rules the recipe out.
- Stone cansGlazed stoneware jars were standard storage vessels. Old and reproduction glazes can contain lead, and a crock cannot hold a vacuum in any case.
- "Porcelain kettle"An enamel-lined iron pot, specified because bare iron and copper discolor berries and react with fruit acid. That part of the instruction is sound and still worth following for any fruit cooking.
- "A small tea-cup water"Genuinely imprecise. Period teacups were generally reckoned at something like half to three-quarters of a modern cup, and the amount was never meant to be exact — just enough to keep the first berries from scorching before their own juice runs.
- If you want canned berriesUse a current USDA or National Center for Home Food Preservation recipe with measured headspace and a timed boiling-water bath. Do not adapt the instructions above.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the wave of large American compilation cookbooks of the 1880s, assembled from contributed household recipes and sold by subscription, and its canning chapter reflects what an ordinary kitchen could manage at the time. The phrase "unless self-sealers are used" is the tell: self-sealing jars were still named as one option among others rather than assumed, and some households were evidently still closing fruit into tin or stoneware with putty and wax. Small berries were the natural first candidate for home canning because they are acidic, need no peeling or pitting, and arrive all at once in quantities no family could eat fresh — the same logic that made berry preserves and shrubs staples long before sealed jars existed. The instruction to omit sugar "for pies" is a reminder that canning here was storage, not confection; the sweetening happened later, when the jar was opened.