TOMATO ACID CHECKS BACTERIA

Some women who have canned soup tell me it spoiled or tasted “sourish and smelled sourish too.”  This is what we call “flat sour.”  It may happen to any vegetable you can, as well as to the soups.  “Flat sour” affects peas, beans, asparagus and corn more than other vegetables.  If the vegetables have been picked for some time and the bacteria have had a chance “to work,” and you are not exceedingly careful about your canning, you may develop “flat sour” in the soup.  If you let one little spore of this bacteria survive all is lost.  Its moist growing place is favorable to development, particularly if not much acid is present.  One little spore left in a jar will multiply in twenty hours to some twenty millions of bacteria.  This twenty million can stand on the point of a needle, so a can could acquire quite a large population in a short time.  Bacteria do not like acids, so it is always a good idea to have tomatoes in your soup mixture, and get the tomatoes into the stone crock early in the game.  The tomato acid will safeguard the other vegetables which lack acid.

If you are careless about the blanching and cold-dipping—­that is, not doing these full time—­if you work too slowly in getting the products into jars and then let the full jars stand in the warm atmosphere, you are pretty sure to develop “flat sour.”

Place each jar in the canner as it is packed.  The first jars in will not be affected by the extra cooking.  Have the water just below the boiling point as you put in each jar.  When you have the canner full bring the water to the boiling point as quickly as possible and begin to count cooking or sterilizing time from the moment it does boil.

Some women make the mistake at the end of the cooking period of letting the jars remain in the boiling water, standing on the false bottom of the canner until they are cool enough to handle with no danger of burning the hands.  This slow method of cooling not only tends to create “flat sour,” but it is apt to result in cloudy-looking jars and in mushy vegetables.

For this reason you should have in your equipment a lifter with which you can lift out the hot jars without the hands touching them.  If you use a rack with wire handles this answers the same purpose.

This “flat sour,” which is not at all dangerous from the standpoint of health, must not be confused with the botulinus bacteria, which is an entirely different thing.

“Flat sour,” perfectly harmless, appears often with inexperienced canners.  Botulinus, harmful, appears rarely.  You need not be at all alarmed about eating either “flat sour” or botulinus, because the odor from spoiled goods is so distasteful—­it really resembles rancid cheese—­that you would never get a spoon of it to your mouth.

If you are debating whether this jar or that jar of soup or vegetables is spoiled, do not taste the contents of the jar. Smell it.  Tasting might poison you if you happened on the botulinus bacteria, which is so rare it need alarm no one; whereas smelling is perfectly safe.