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Canned Pine Apples
Mrs. F. L. Bristol.
For six pounds of fruit when cut and ready to can make syrup with two and a half pounds of sugar and nearly three pints of water; boil syrup five minutes and skim or strain if necessary; then add the fruit, and let it boil up; have cans hot, fill and shut up as soon as possible. Use the best white sugar. As the cans cool keep tightening them up.
This is open-kettle canning: hot fruit into hot jars, lids closed and then re-tightened as they cool. It was standard practice in the 1870s and is no longer considered a safe way to preserve anything. The notes below explain what fails rather than how to fix it.
- No processing step at allThe fruit is boiled and the jars are filled, but the sealed jars are never processed in boiling water. Nothing sterilises the jar rim, the lid, or the headspace air, and molds and yeasts routinely survive that gap. Any current tested recipe for canned pineapple calls for a measured boiling-water-bath time by jar size and altitude; use one of those instead.
- "Keep tightening them up"This instruction belongs to nineteenth-century jars with zinc caps and rubber rings, where a fresh turn as the glass contracted helped draw the seal. Modern two-piece lids seal by vacuum as they cool, and tightening a cooling band prevents air escaping and produces a false seal that looks fine and is not.
- Spoilage can raise the acidity you were relying onPineapple is an acid fruit, which is the only reason this method survived as long as it did. But surface molds growing in an imperfectly sealed jar consume acid and can lift the pH into the range where Clostridium botulinum becomes a concern, so an unprocessed jar is not self-protecting over months of storage.
- Fruit ripeness is not controlledThe recipe says nothing about ripeness, and pineapple acidity varies considerably between varieties and stages of ripening. Tested modern procedures assume ripe fruit plus a measured process time precisely because the fruit alone cannot be counted on.
- "Cans" means glass jarsIn a book of this date a "can" is a glass preserving jar with a metal cap, not a tin; the instruction to keep tightening them confirms it here. Nothing in the recipe can be adapted to actual tin cans.
- The syrup, for referenceSix pounds of prepared fruit to two and a half pounds of sugar and nearly three pints of water works out to almost as much sugar as water by weight, a rich syrup by modern reckoning. "Best white sugar" simply means refined cane sugar rather than the yellowish grades then common; ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women and sold to benefit a charitable home, which is why so many entries carry a signature like Mrs. F. L. Bristol's rather than a house style. That fresh pineapple appears here at all, by the six pounds, says something about the period: steamship links from Cuba and the Bahamas had brought the fruit within reach of North American kitchens, and rail shipment from Florida is generally associated with the decades that followed, though it was still enough of an event to be worth putting up for winter. Large-scale commercial pineapple canning in Hawaii came only around the turn of the century, so a household wanting canned pineapple in the 1870s generally made its own. The open-kettle method described here seems to have been a common way of doing it, and the pineapple's own acidity did much of the work; the boiling-water bath and its measured times became standard household advice only later, as the causes of spoilage were properly understood.