Consensus is (consensus, meaning the home economist at the extension office, and the woman at the Ball canning hotline) that I should not use recipes from the 1970's that do not process in a water bath for at least ten minutes. As the rutabaga jam needed only to be spooned into sterilised jars, I was advised against it. I could try doing the boiling water bath, but as the recipe is untested it might over-thicken (as it is cooked on the stove top to 200 degrees F.) and be useless.
It's not like anyone screamed:
Oh my gosh, you idiot-you'll get botulism!" or anything like that, but since they seemed to feel so strongly about processing it in the boiling water, I took that to mean, "Oh my gosh, you idiot-you'll get botulism", and really, who the hell wants that?
The problem, (according to the USDA where the guidelines originate) is that the soils are different than they were as little as twenty years ago and due to acid rain, there are different bacterias that can thrive that never used to. Now this could all be hogwash, or an explanation coming from someone that never took biology much less earth science trying to summarise a government guideline-at any rate, I'm not about to second guess the advice. If I were soaking this in booze, like the pears from a few weeks ago or Jenn's mincemeat, it would be a different story, but a jam of rutabagas, oranges and thyme simply does not seem worth the risk. It's not like if we get hit with a nuclear warhead tomorrow that I'm going to be holed-up in a fallout shelter kicking myself for not canning the rutabagas*.
I'll go ahead and make a short version of the recipe to serve tonight and tomorrow. Under refrigeration I suspect it would keep a week fine, but we'll use it over a couple of days as a sort of chutney.
*No, I'm not canning to stock a fallout shelter, though given the state of the world it might not be an entirely bad idea.
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