"Mary Fisher" wrote in message
t...

"graham" wrote in message
news:wb8Ki.237443$fJ5.93444@pd7urf1no...

"jane" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 18:07:09 +0200, Martin wrote:

My canning experience started with finding a US website with a lot of
very useful info on fruit preservation (hence pressing reply after
Martin's post!)

http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5343.html

Though beware of the oops in the berries/apples bit!

In N.America, they even process jams as if they were bottling fruit.
Completely unnecessary but it must be the recipe-writers fear of legal
action if anything were to go wrong.

Yes, I subscribed to a food preserving group for a time, the participants
were mostly N American.

They seemed to be obsessed about botulism. Very, very few people die from
botulism whether they eat canned foods or not. I - and a couple of other
Brits - couldn't bear it. We went back to our old ways and even - shock
horror! - eating raw food on occasion ...

I was surprised last week when a nutritionist on a local CBC radio program
said that it was not necessary to process jams. After all, they are way
above 100C when you pour them into the sterilised jars.
I succumbed to the processing instructions a couple of years ago when I made
some herb infused apple jellies. The overcooking made them very tacky
(slightly toffee-like) and ruined the texture. I bought some jam from the
local farmers' market and had to return it because the maker had
over-processed it to that same tacky point.
Graham