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Directions for Canning Fruit

A method for canning various fruits by boiling sugar syrup and placing cooked fruit into hot jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 21 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and peach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 163 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Directions for Canning Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar and water together.

Cook the fruit

  1. Drop a portion of the fruit into the boiling syrup.

  2. Cook for the specified time: Cherries (5 min), Raspberries (6 min), Blackberries (6 min), Strawberries (8 min), Plums (10 min), Bartlett Pears (20 min), Peaches (8 min).

  3. Use a strainer to dip out the cooked fruit and place it into hot jars.

  4. Repeat until all fruit is cooked.

Pack and seal

  1. Cover the fruit in the jars with the syrup and seal immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Plum + peachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Plum + bartlett peartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  3. Bartlett pear + peachtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Sugar + peachtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + plumtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and adds body to the liquid that fills the jars.
Fruit (in the method)
Provides the flavour and texture of the canned product.

The step that matters

Sealing the jars immediately after covering the fruit with syrup. Sealing while the fruit and jars are still hot helps create a vacuum as they cool, which keeps air and spoilage microbes out. Delaying the seal lets the contents cool and can weaken the seal.

Swap the bartlett pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, plum, peach):

  1. Apricotfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Bartlett pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, plum, peach. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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