Self-Preservation: Stick with tested recipes for preserving food
TARALEEN ELLIOTT
The best thing about being retired is being able to do pretty much whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it. Finding ways to combine my different interests is so much fun.
In addition to being a master food preserver, I also love history and I’m a bit obsessed with genealogy.
I was searching the online National Archives when I discovered they needed “citizen archivists” to help transcribe and tag documents. Oh my gosh, what an addicting find this was! I’ve transcribed a UFO sighting in Myrtle Creek (my family’s hometown), slave records, Civil War enlistment records, WWII interment records of Portland residents of Japanese descent, tagged WWI photos and have discovered so many historical tidbits.
This month is National Canned Food Month so it seemed appropriate to look into the history of food preservation and the National Archives was a natural place to start.
You can thank Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution for canned food. Napoleon offered a cash prize to improve the food preservation methods used at the time. He was searching for a way to keep his armies fed because the dried and salted food spoiled, leaving the troops starving and weakened.
It took 15 years of experimenting but Nicolas Appert finally won the prize with a method of heating, boiling and sealing food in airtight glass jars. Appert started his canning experiments using champagne bottles and later started using wide mouth glass jars. He opened a canning operation and by 1804 was using tin cans, soldered shut, and then he’d wait months to see if the cans swelled up. If they didn’t swell up, he considered them safe and sold them. Not a method I recommend!
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Here’s where my story loops back to the National Archives and includes a leap to the start of modern food technology. In the National Archives, I discovered Mary Engle Pennington, a leading expert in food safety and sanitation. Pennington attended the University of Pennsylvania in 1890 and completed coursework for a degree but, because she was a woman, she was denied a bachelor’s degree and was instead given a “certificate of proficiency.” With the support of faculty she was able to complete a Ph.D. and went on to become a bacteriological chemist.
In 1901 she opened her own laboratory to provide clinical analyses for local doctors. In 1904 she became the head of the Philadelphia Department of Health and Charities and focused on the issue of unsafe milk. She established standards for the milk production industry that eventually were used nationwide. She was recruited by the head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry to lead the first-ever Food Research Laboratory and created the first set of food safety standards.
This is a very roundabout way of advising you once again to use only tested recipes when canning food. As the science of food preservation evolves, our knowledge increases and we need to stay current on the most up to date methods to use. Please don’t rely on random blogs, YouTube videos or any source other than your local Extension Service, USDA publications, National Center for Home Food Preservation, the instructions on the pectin products or the recipes from Ball Fresh Preserving. These sources provide recipes and methods that have been tested and are safe to use.
They will tell you when it is safe to make substitutions or to alter a recipe so please do not experiment on your own outside of these parameters. There are many factors that are scientifically analyzed when testing recipes; density of the products used, the ph levels, processing times and how long it takes the product to heat throughout the entire jar. This testing is not something that you can do at home so play it safe and let the scientists do the work for you.
Here are some examples of outdated canning information you can find online. Using paraffin wax to seal jams and jelly is no longer recommended because over time the paraffin can shrink and expand allowing mold and yeast to grown.
You can find videos that claim it is safe to can green beans in a boiling water canner instead of a pressure canner. They claim no one in their family has died from it so it must be safe to do. I don’t really know how to respond to that other than to say, “Don’t do it!” You run the risk of death from botulism and if you do survive you’ll potentially have over $1 million in medical bills.
Salsa recipes, the favorite recipe that people experiment with. The recipes are everywhere! I am guilty of being lured in by that perfect sounding recipe but those days are over. I resist those glossy blog photos of luscious looking salsa and stick with tested recipes. I found a video that tells you to fill the jars with hot tomato sauce, crank the rings down really hard, turn the jars upside down for five minutes and they will seal. There are so many things wrong with this I’ll just say, don’t do any of that!
Stick with tested recipes and enjoy your safe and tasty home preserved food.
Taraleen Elliott, who has been involved with the Master Food Preserver training program through Oregon State University Extension Service, is writing a series of columns on food preservation.
