Montana wrote:Yes. There are special seals that need to be used. You need to add a tablespoon of lemon juice to each bottle before you add the tomatoes to nutrilize the acid in the tomatoes, then put the special seal and boil the bottles for 35 minutes. The pressure makes the sealers pop which is when you know they're sealed. After they're sealed they're good for a year.
In fact, they last more than a year. I was raised by my grandparents, and we worked nearly full-time in the garden in season. We thereby produced all of the vegetables we ate in a year, and more to spare, and most of the fruit--the rest of the fruit we gathered where it grew wild, such as blackberries and blueberries. We also "picked up" walnuts and hickory nuts in a wood which had grown up in an ancient abandoned stone quarry.
When done properly, home canning preserves the food for quite a long time--i recall once in 1963 that my grandmother sent me into the basement to get a quart of green beans, and, as always, admonished me to find the oldest date. Looking around, i found that most of the oldest dates were 1961, except for one jar which had apparently been overlooked for some time, and was dated 1957. The beans were perfectly edible, and had the same "crunch" and flavor as would have any from 1961. We were real producers--although we gave away quite a bit of the production, we still managed to produce more than we would eat, so it was common that the date on the jar was from two years previously, we didn't start using the last year's production until spring and early summer before the new crop was harvested.
This also reminds me of a family i met once while hitchhiking. A guy in a pick-up stopped, and offered to take me about 20 miles. In the course of the ride, he said that as the sun was going down, he would be happy to offer me a sofa to sleep on, and a ride to the interstate in the morning. I took him up on his offer, and when we arrived at his house, his wife and three children were busy with the tomato harvest--30 bushels! They were canning tomatoes in the traditional method (blanch, peel and put in the jar whole), they were making tomato sauce (in the American meaning, such as one makes for use with pasta), and they were making catsup (what the English call tomato sauce). This was way more than they would have used themselves. I understood that one keeps canned goods for years as is necessary, but this was extraordinary. Through the course of the evening, though, i learned why they had produced so much. Elderly and poor people from the mountains in which they lived (central New Mexico, just west of Tucumcari) stopped by, and were given large carboard cartons of catsup, tomato sauce and stewed tomatoes (the whole, skinless ones). From casual conversation, i learned they did the same with corn, several kinds of beans, cabbage, carrots (which can be pickled) and pickled cucumbers. Many people would have looked at this "handy man" as poor and poorly paid, and the beat-up truck and the house he had built himself might have reinforced such a blind opinion. But he kept goats and milch cows and had accumulated quite a large herd of steers (about 20 to 30). The steers represented cash on the hoof, which he could sell at times when a large amount of cash were suddenly needed. Otherwise, he produced the milk, butter, cheese and meat his family consumed, and was a crucial resource to his small community.
He had great reefer, too, but you didn't hear that from me.
