Adventures in Home Canning

The Kerr Home Canning Book (1944) does its best to make home canning look appealing. Just look at the bounty of garden-fresh berries surrounding the sparkling new mason jars.

But I know the reality of home canning was sweating over a very hot canning setup in a very hot house, and that's after you've already spent god knows how long cleaning/ peeling/ chopping/ pitting/ slicing/ and/ or doing whatever else was required to get the stuff you were going to can ready in the first place. I helped my grandma can peaches once, sweating even though she had air conditioning (unlike the original audience for this booklet). I distinctly remember thinking, "Or we could just buy canned peaches for less than a dollar" (which was true back then, if not so much now).

Of course, in 1944 it was Patriotic (with a capital "P"!) to can anything and everything to help save food. This booklet actually starts with a rallying cry from an actual mason jar! 

Sorry, a  capital-M capital-J Mason Jar. Kerr is laying it on thick here. From "I was bred of flint... and born of fire... to serve America by serving you" to "I hold the secret of your youngster's rosy cheeks... I hold strength for workers' strong right arms, and steadiness to give their hands," the company wanted home-canners to see this work as more than just one more goddamn chore.

The booklet has the formulas for canning various fruits and vegetables, of course. It also has the expected jams, jellies, pickles, preserves, relishes, etc. There are some unexpected ones, too. I imagined I'd see a recipe for pumpkin butter (and I did), but I was pretty surprised by this Pumpkin Preserves recipe.

It's not pumpkin spice flavor! Instead, little slices of pumpkin mingle with orange and lemon slices in a thick sugar syrup. That's not a pumpkin prep we tend to see today.

The book also includes a reminder that there's a reason Heinz bottles specify that they contain tomato ketchup, as there's a wide array of other types of catsups that home cooks used to make, like apple...

(Well, apple and onion, though the onion doesn't get marquee treatment.)

... and crab apple...

...and elderberry...

(which can be altered to grape or plum if desired!)

...or satsuma plum...

...or, if you want something odd to pair with the pumpkin preserves to make a very unusual Thanksgiving dinner, cranberry.

The book also offers some recipes for ways to preserve meat. If you've been saving meat coupons by shooting neighborhood rabbits, Kerr suggests turning the fuzzy little guys into canned sausage.

Am I alone in thinking that calling it "Bunny Sausage" makes it sadder? I'd expect the less sentimental "Rabbit Sausage." Maybe the cute name is an attempt to make the kids too upset to eat it, so the meat will stretch even further?

I was also surprised to see some recipes that might seem too "exotic" for the white, midwestern home cooks that populate my imaginary version of the 1940s. I know that tamales wrapped in wax paper (rather than corn husks) before being canned are not the tastiest versions of the recipe.

Still, I was surprised they appeared at all! This recipe even calls for a full quarter cup of chili powder in the meat, plus more in the cornmeal mixture, at a time when chili recipes didn't always even call for chili powder.

The 1940s home canners had a bigger range than I expected. I guess they needed something to make all those hot and humid days seem like a bit of an adventure. I doubt that too many of them covered their tables with an array of magnolias and canned goods to make some kind of a demented display when they were done, though. That's something best left to Kerr.