Vintage pressure canner gasket (water, good, America, buy)

[tcrackly]

I have an old 1950s? era Burpee 7 quart canner that was my old faithful until recently when I assumed the rubber gasket has become compromised. I have replaced it with a new American Standard but i still hate to discard it if it's still functional for large volume canning. I'm wondering if any posters have a line on replacement gaskets for such a unit?

[Nor'Eastah]

If you look for "Miss Vickie's Pressure Cooker Forum" you will see a short article about why the old Burpee pressure canners are not safe by today's standards. All parts have been discontinued. She recommends that you discard the old lid for it, and replace with a newer non-pressure lid, then use it as a water bath canner.

We have an older Mirro canner that we have done this with. It makes a great general cooking pot and we also use it for water bath canning. That way you can be both safe and find a good use for an older item that you hate to throw away.

[tcrackly]

If that's the case i don't need to replace the lid but simply use it without a gasket and clamp and leave all the vents open---essentially an extremely heavy water bath canner!

[HJ99]

Lot of the older pressure cookers and canners still fine, just you cant buy gasket (if it takes a gasket, some didnt). You can measure the gasket it needs and look for a substitute. What style gasket did it have. The flat gaskets you can just buy material like silicone sheet and cut your own. The kind that fits in a little groove is harder, you have to find one for something else and coax it. The modern C-type sometimes can find Chinese universal gasket that will fit, they are sold by size on Ebay and Amazon. Sometimes they work, sometimes not thick enough.



I have seen a Burpee canner but not examined it up close. So no idea what the gasket looks like.



Any website that is selling or recommending new wonder pressure cookers with a link do have vested interest in people not keeping older cookers functioning.



Honestly lot of the old cookers/canners are perfectly safe for those with some common sense. The new stuff is made failsafe for those without any common sense. If you have no common sense dont use older machines of any kind, they werent necessarily very forgiving of stupidity.