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 page gives advice for salvaging or disguising food that has begun to spoil. Spoiled food can carry dangerous bacteria and toxins that no washing, soaking, or seasoning removes; it should be discarded.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Canning Fruits › Warranted Canned Strawberries
Warranted Canned Strawberries
Take Put four pounds white sugar in a kettle, add a teacup cold water, let boil till perfectly clear, then add four quarts nice berries. Boil ten minutes, keeping them covered with syrup, but avoid stirring in order to preserve their good appearance. out berries with a small strainer or skimmer, place in a crock and let the syrup boil ten minutes longer, then pour it over berries, and, when cool, fill the cans, putting a tablespoon of good brandy on top of each can, screw on lid tightly, and put in a dry dark place. This method is the only means of preserving the peculiar flavor of the strawberries. To prevent the second handling, put the hot berries in the cans (instead of the crock) till about three quarters full. When syrup has boiled, fill each can with it, let stand till cool, then cover with the tablespoon of brandy (take out a little juice if necessary) and screw on the lid.
If after two or three weeks the least fermentation appears, put the cans in a boiler (on a small board to prevent contact with bottom), fill with cold water nearly to top of cans, loosen the lids, but do not take them off, let water boil for a little while, then take out cans, tighten the covers and the berries will keep over a year. Fully ripe currants and acid cherries canned in same manner, one pound of sugar to one of dressed fruit, are delicious. They never need a second boiling if carefully prepared.
Always select perfect fruit; cook in porcelain, never in metal. In making catsup, instead of boiling, some sprinkle the tomatoes with salt and let them stand over night, then strain and add spices, etc., and a little sugar. Bottle in glass or stone, and never use tin cans; keep in a cool, dry, dark place. If, on opening, there is a leathery mold on top, carefully remove every particle of it, and the catsup will not be injured. To prevent this molding, some do not fill the bottles quite to the top with catsup, but fill up with hot vinegar. If there are white specks of mold all through the catsup it is spoiled. If, on opening and using a part, there is danger that the rest may sour, scald, and, if too thick, add vinegar. Sauces should always be made with great care in a pan set in hot water, having the sauce pan clean if a delicate flavor is desired, especially if the sauce is drawn butter. Butter and those sauces containing eggs should never boil. Wooden spoons must be used for stirring. An excellent thickening for soups, sauces and gravies is prepared as follows: Bring butter just to the boiling point in a small stewpan, dredge in flour, stirring together until well cooked. This, when not cooked brown, is "White Roux," and when browned, "Brown Roux." Thin this with a part of the soup, sauce or gravy, and add it to the whole, stirring thoroughly. The flour may be browned before using if intended for brown gravies or sauces. Melted butter may be used in place of oil in all recipes where the latter is named.
Mint, when used in recipes, usually means "spearmint" or "green mint," though pennyroyal and peppermint are of the same (128) family. The young leaves of from one to six inches in length are the parts used. It grows on any good garden soil, but comes forward earlier in a warm, sunny spot. It is propagated by cuttings or dividing the roots of old plants in the spring, is very prolific, and ought to find a place in every garden. Those who have conservatories should keep a root in pots, to use with spring lamb before the leaves would appear in the open air. Mint leaves for drying should be cut from the stalks just before the plant blossoms, and spread out thinly in some dry, shady place, where they can dry slowly. When dry, put up in paper bags and keep in a dry place until wanted.
This is open-kettle canning: fruit and syrup are ladled into jars, capped, and set aside with no processing at all, with a spoonful of brandy floating on top as the sole safeguard. The page also tells the reader to reheat jars that have begun to ferment and to scrape mold off catsup. Neither practice is acceptable now, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- No heat processing after sealingThe berries and syrup are cooled before the lids go on, so the jar is sealed at room temperature with no vacuum and no sterilizing step. Any yeast, mold or bacterial spore introduced during the transfer from kettle to crock to jar is sealed in with a sugar syrup that will feed it. A modern water-bath process exists precisely to kill what gets in during filling.
- The brandy layer does nothingA tablespoon of spirit floating on a jar of syrup (the recipe never states the can size) works out to well under one per cent alcohol once it mixes. It cannot preserve the contents; at best it slows surface mold.
- Reboiling fermented jarsThe instruction to loosen the lids of fermenting cans and boil them is the most dangerous line here. Visible fermentation means microbial growth has already been under way for weeks, and heating destroys the organisms without destroying the products of their metabolism. A jar that has fermented is a jar to empty, not to rescue.
- Acidity is not a licenceStrawberries, currants and sour cherries are high-acid fruits, so Clostridium botulinum is not the primary hazard in this particular jar. Molds and yeasts are, and some molds that grow on stored fruit raise the pH of their surroundings enough to open the door for other organisms. High acid reduces one risk; it does not make an unprocessed seal safe.
- The catsup advice is worseRemoving "leathery mold" from the top of a bottle and declaring the rest uninjured ignores the fact that mold sends filaments well below the visible growth and can leave mycotoxins behind. Tomato is also a borderline-acid food, which is why current guidance specifies added acid for home-canned tomato products.
- Archaic measures, for reading onlyA teacup in books of this period is usually reckoned at four to six fluid ounces; a crock is a glazed stoneware jar used for holding, not cooking; "porcelain" means a porcelain- or enamel-lined kettle, specified so the fruit acid would not react with bare iron or copper. The strawberry proportion is given as a volume of fruit to a weight of sugar and so cannot be set directly against the one pound of sugar to one pound of fruit the recipe specifies for currants and cherries.
- If you want canned strawberriesUse a current USDA or National Center for Home Food Preservation recipe with a specified jar size, headspace and water-bath time. Nothing in the method above should be carried across, including the brandy.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of large compiled household manuals that circulated in the American South in the 1880s, assembled from contributed recipes and reprinted domestic advice, which is why this page drifts from strawberries to catsup to roux to growing mint without pause. The canning method it defends so firmly is open-kettle canning, the standard home practice for most of the nineteenth century: glass jars with screw bands had been available since the late 1850s, and cooks reasonably assumed that a good seal on well-boiled fruit was enough. The claim that this is "the only means of preserving the peculiar flavor of the strawberries" reflects a real complaint of the period, that long boiling turned berries to dull jam, and the brief ten-minute boil plus a brandy float was the compromise. Federal and state guidance began pushing home canners toward measured processing and, for low-acid foods, pressure canning in the early twentieth century, once the bacteriology of spoilage and of botulism was understood; pages like this one are the practice that guidance was written to replace.