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Oranged Strawberries
Place a layer of strawberries in a deep dish; cover the same thickly with pulverized sugar; then a layer of berries, and so on, until all are used. Pour over them orange juice, in the proportion of three oranges to a quart of berries. Let stand for an hour, and just before serving sprinkle with pounded ice. Some use claret, grape or currant wine instead of orange juice.
A macerated fruit dish rather than a cooked one, so the only real variables are sugar, timing and temperature. A few of the terms have shifted since 1877.
- Pulverized sugarThis is superfine or caster sugar, not modern powdered/confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will cloud the syrup. Granulated sugar works but dissolves more slowly; pulse it briefly in a blender if you want the period texture.
- How much fruitA quart of strawberries is roughly 1 1/2 lb, or about 4 cups hulled. With three oranges' juice (about 3/4 to 1 cup) that gives four to six servings.
- Sugar quantity is left to you"Thickly" is the only guide. Two to three tablespoons per cup of hulled berries is a reasonable reading; taste the fruit first and adjust, since modern cultivars vary widely in sweetness and are generally larger and milder than the small berries of the 1870s.
- The hour mattersThe standing time is the whole technique: sugar draws juice out of the fruit and the released liquid combines with the orange juice to make the syrup. Much less than an hour and there is little syrup; several hours in the refrigerator and the berries slump.
- Pounded iceCrushed ice; in a period kitchen it would have been broken up by hand rather than machine. It served in place of refrigeration, and it waters the syrup as it melts. Chilling the dish and using only a little ice at the table gives a better result.
- Hull, do not sliceThe layering assumes whole berries. Halve only very large ones; sliced fruit collapses into the syrup over an hour.
- The wine variationClaret here means dry red Bordeaux-style wine. Grape and currant wine were home-made and sweet, so if substituting a modern sweet fruit wine, cut the sugar back sharply.
Buckeye Cookery's fruit section includes a number of preparations of this kind, and the brief local strawberry season in June was worth dressing up in a household with little fresh fruit for much of the year. Sugaring berries and letting them stand is among the simplest ways to make a dessert of soft fruit without cooking it, and the addition of orange juice reflects a shift in nineteenth-century American shopping: oranges, both imported and Florida-grown, were becoming a purchasable luxury in inland cities rather than an impossibility, though the large rail-borne citrus trade expanded mainly in the decades that followed. The alternative of claret or home-made currant wine points the other way, to the older practice of moistening fruit with whatever the cellar held. The instruction to sprinkle with pounded ice is a reminder that ice, cut in winter and stored in ice-houses, was itself a household commodity to be spent carefully.