Canning for Victory - Vintage Videos for TV Thursday

Today I’ve chosen a vintage video on canning to share.

Those of you who have followed Frugal Upstate for a while know I’m kind of a food preservation junkie. I not only do I love to try new recipes and share all about various food preservation methods with folks (canning, freezing, dehydrating, fermenting. . .you get the idea) but I’m also a trained Master Food Perserver for the Cornell Cooperative Extension. That means I’ve been officially trained using the materials and standards from the National Center for Home Food Preservation (run by the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension service) and I teach classes on how to preserve food to folks in my county.

With the war effort in the 1940’s and rationing beginning early in 1942, homemakers were encouraged to plant Victory Gardens in order to grow vegetables to supplement their rations. At the same time, a massive attempt was made to teach women to can their excess produce–both to supplement their winter diet and to allow them to donate foods such as jams and jellies to the war effort. There were even community canning kitchens set up in many places

Community canning centers aided in the process of reaching record levels of preserved food in the United States during the war. In 1945, the USDA stated that 6,000 canning centers were in operation throughout the United States. These centers were locally sponsored and financially supported, but with instructional and educational oversight provided by the USDA. — from the National Women’s History Museum “Food Rationing and Canning”

“Canning the Victory Crop” is a film produced as part of that effort! This 21 minute colorized vintage film shows the most up to date methods known at the time. The info is pretty much up to today’s standard actually–but make sure you follow the current guidelines if you plan on canning.

I find it interesting to see all the different types of lids and jars that used to be available. Of course today we only use the single use flat lids. Believe it or not, when I was trained, we learned that the old two piece glass jars with the wire bails can still be used as long as you use new gaskets (which you can purchase online or at Agway and places like that). They just have a much higher rate of failure as there are more surfaces you are trying to seal (the gasket to the glass on both sides) and the jars tend to be far older. It is not recommended at all to re-use store bought jars today as they suggest in this film. I’m sure that was a wartime rationing issue–or maybe their store jars were thicker than ours are today.

It’s very cool how they have a special pot where you can see inside the pressure canner and observe what is happening inside.

Watching these ladies work, I was very grateful for my canning funnel, jar lifter, my vegetable peeler and especially my All American Pressure Canner!

Want to learn more about canning? I can help: