Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Fruits
Fruits
"Fruit of all kinds, in coat Rough, or smooth rind, or bearded husk, or shell, She gathers tribute large, and on the board Heaps with unsparing hand." -PARADISE LOST.
Bring me berries or such cooling fruit As the kind, hospitable woods provide. -COWPER.
The Fruit for preserving should be carefully selected removing all that are imperfect. They are in the best condition when not fully ripe, and as soon as possible after they are picked. Small fruit should not be allowed to stand over night after they are picked when they are to be preserved. Use only the finest sugar for preserving. When fruit is sealed in glass cans, wrap paper of two or three thicknesses around the cans. chemical action of light will affect the quality of the preserves when perfectly air-tight. With this precaution, glass cans are preferable to any other for preserving fruit. One-half a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is a good rule for canned fruit, although many housekeepers use but one-quarter of a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit.
An excellent rule for canning the larger fruits, as peaches, pears, etc., is to place them in a steamer over a kettle of boiling water, laying first a cloth in the bottom of the steamer. Fill this with the fruit and cover tightly. Let them steam for fifteen minutes, or until they can be easily pierced with a fork (some fruits will require a longer time). Make a syrup of sugar of the right consistency. As the fruit is steamed, drop each for a moment in the syrup, then place in the cans, having each one half full of fruit, and then fill up with the hot syrup, then cover and seal.
This is a general method for putting up fruit rather than a single dish, and it belongs to the era of open-kettle canning, in which jars were filled hot and sealed with no processing afterwards. That step is the reason the method has been abandoned, and the notes below explain the vocabulary and the failure.
- No processing after sealingThe fruit is steamed, dipped in syrup, packed and sealed, and nothing further is done to it. Nothing in the sequence heats the sealed jar and its headspace to a temperature that reliably destroys mould and yeast, and the seal itself is never tested by cooling under vacuum. Current tested procedures for canned fruit call for a measured boiling-water bath after filling; use a current guide rather than this page.
- Why the seal is the weak pointAn open-kettle seal forms from steam trapped at packing, which is unpredictable. A jar that appears sealed may hold a partial vacuum only, and spoilage organisms drawn in through a marginal lid have a sugar syrup at room temperature to grow in for months before anyone opens it.
- Sugar is not the preservative hereAt a quarter to a half pound of sugar per pound of fruit the syrup is far too dilute to inhibit anything. That ratio is about 1/2 to 1 cup of granulated sugar per pound of fruit, and it is a flavour and texture choice, not a safety measure. Preserves that keep on sugar alone run to roughly equal weights of sugar and fruit.
- "The finest sugar"In a book of this date this most likely means the whitest, most fully refined loaf or granulated sugar, as opposed to the darker, less pure grades then common; it may also simply mean the finest-grained. Either way, ordinary modern granulated sugar answers the description.
- "Syrup of the right consistency"No proportions are given, and none can be reconstructed with confidence. Nineteenth-century syrup grades were judged by eye and by thread, and different fruits were given different strengths; treat the phrase as an omission rather than a shorthand you can decode.
- Wrapping the jars in paperThis part of the advice still holds. Light bleaches the colour and degrades flavour compounds in fruit stored in glass. Modern practice simply stores sealed jars in a dark cupboard, which does the same job as two or three thicknesses of paper.
- The steamerA cloth in the bottom of the steamer keeps the fruit off the hot metal and stops the skins tearing, and the page gives fifteen minutes only as a starting point, adding that some fruits will need longer and that the test is whether a fork goes in easily. This is a sound way to soften fruit for a dessert eaten the same day; it is not a canning step.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold for charity, and its fruit chapter arrives with epigraphs from Milton and Cowper because a household book of that decade was expected to be improving as well as useful. The confidence about glass is the interesting detail: screw-top and clamp-top preserving jars had become widely available in North America through the 1860s and 1870s, and cooks were still weighing them against the older tin cans that had to be soldered shut and the stoneware crocks sealed with wax or bladder. The writer's preference for glass, hedged only by the worry about light, marks the moment the domestic glass jar won. What has not survived is the open-kettle technique she describes, which was standard practice for decades and was displaced during the twentieth century once laboratory work on spoilage established that the sealed jar itself must be heated for a measured time.