Oven Canning and Other No Longer Approved Methods
I do oven canning every year, just like my aunt did. I have a Good Housekeeping cookbook just like hers from the 50s with the time table for oven canning everything, even meats and vegetabes. She canned everything in the oven, however, I only use oven canning for high acid items like fruits and tomatoes. No water bath canner will ever hold as much as an oven, and I have eaten the stuff all my life with no illness from it.
I do pressure can vegetable like beans and such, not because I think oven or water bath would be unsafe, but because the times are so much faster in the pressure canner, which equals less heat being in my house than a water bath canner or an oven on for hours and hours in mid-August.
I do feel meat is probably safer pressure canned, but growing up I ate plenty of water bath canned chili, vegetable beef soup, venison, and such, with no ill affect.
I do not process jam jelly or pickles other than pouring the boiling product into a jar, putting on a boiled lid, and turning the jar upside down. Yes, open kettle method. I do the same for fruits and tomatoes if I only have 2 or 3 jars worth to do.
Sourkraut, pickled corn, pickled beans, and a few other pickle recipes are not sealed at all. They continue to ferment in the jar, getting stronger with age. These are the old style recipes that rely on a fermentation process rather than vinegar for the sourness and preservation. Nothing is crisper. (Gramma used big crocks in her younger days for those, I am not feeding as many peple as she did. as years went on she started making them in jars.)
I still can sausage like gramma as well. Fry the sausage till done, put in a boiled jar, pour in the sizzling hot grease, put on a boiled lid, and turn the jar upside down. Never been sick from that either, and modern books say it is sure death.
I'm not advising anyone else to use the methods I do for canning, but I do want to sort of defend others who do so. An impeccably clean kitchen, proper time for the method used, and careful examination of contents are very important if using old methods like my family does. It also probably helps if one is taught these methods from childhood rather than attempting them on their own for the first time.
Modern methods are probably more bulletproof, but i prefer the ease and speed of my methods, and I cannot stand a water bathed pickle, no matter what the modern books say, in my opinion that "breif water bath to insure sterility" ruins the pickle.