Putting Food By - Janet Greene [84]
Remove fish and refrigerate 8 to 12 hours, or overnight, to ensure firm texture and good flavor. Then scrape away the skin, lift out the bones, remove dark streaks of flesh along the sides. Cut the cold chunks of fish ¾ inch shorter than the height of the containers (½-pints are about 4 inches tall, so the steak rounds of fish would be about 3¼ inches thick). Put ½ teaspoon optional salt and 3 tablespoons fresh water (or salad oil) in the bottom of each jar. Pack solidly with fish, and leave ½ inch of headroom.
To exhaust, half-close the lids as for Salmon, and boil hard in the Pressure Canner at Zero pounds (see the section on Salmon again) for 10 minutes: check center of contents of a test jar to make sure it has reached 170 F/77 C. When jars are exhausted, finish screwing the bands down firmly tight.
Pressure-process at 15 pounds (250 F/121 C) for 100 minutes. Remove jars; air-cool naturally.
• Adjustment for my altitude_________________.
Lake Trout, Whitefish, Small Mackerel, Florida Mullet
Pressure Canning only. Raw pack and exhaust. Use pint jars (preferably straight-sided) with two-piece screwband lids only.
About 35 pounds of fish, round weight, will fill 12 pint jars.
Remove the head, tail, fins, and scales and scrub perfectly fresh fish. Split the fish, leaving in the backbone; cut away the thin belly strip. Following the directions for Salmon, above, cut in jar-length pieces and brine the pieces for 60 minutes in a cold solution of ¾ cup pure pickling salt dissolved in 1 gallon of water. Remove the fish pieces, drain, and pack solidly just to the top of the jars—not more than inch below the sealing rim—alternating head and tail sections upright in the jars for a firm pack, with skin sides next to the glass.
Use the kettle of your big enameled Boiling–Water Bath for exhausting the jars, because they will be boiled in a weak brine that would mar the metal surface of your Pressure Canner. Do not cap the filled jars; put them, open, on the rack in the B–W Bath kettle; pour in a fresh hot brine of ⅓ cup pure pickling salt dissolved in 1 gallon of water, until the brine comes 1 inch above the top of the jars. Bring to boiling, and boil the jars briskly for 15 minutes, which should be enough to raise the temperature deep inside the jars to a minimum of 170 F/77 C (check with your thermometer to make sure).
Remove the jars and invert them to drain on a wire cake-cooling rack for about 3 minutes. (Clap the blade of a slotted metal spatula over the mouth of the jar before you up-end it, and you won’t have to worry about bits of fish sliding out.) Right the jars, wipe their rims carefully to remove any speck of material that would interfere with the seal; put on the lids and screw the bands down firmly tight.
Pressure-process at 10 pounds (240 F/116 C) for 1 hour and 40 minutes. Remove jars; air-cool naturally.
• Adjustment for my altitude_________________.
Crab—Dungeness (Pacific) and Blue (Atlantic)
Pressure Canning only. Precook and exhaust. Use only ½-pint jars with two-piece screwband lids.
To fill twelve ½-pint jars it will take about 25 pounds live weight of average-size Atlantic crabs, or 13 to 15 average Pacific crabs.
Use enameled or stainless steel ware for boiling or acid-blanching shellfish—never use copper or iron. And never use seawater: use fresh drinking water to which you’ve added salt, etc.
For canning use only fresh-caught, frisky crabs in prime condition (not recently molted, not feeble or sickly). To avoid needless contamination of the meat by visceral matter you should butcher and clean them before precooking. Stun the live crab by holding it in the freezer for half an hour, or submerging in ice water, then quickly twist off the legs, take off the back, remove gills and “butter” and the rest of the innards; clean out the body cavity under a strong flow of fresh, cool drinking water. Save claws and bodies of Atlantic crabs, discarding their legs as too small to bother with; save legs as well as claws and bodies of Pacific crabs, which are larger.
Meanwhile prepare and have heating