Home › Preserving › Strawberry and Pineapple Preserve
Strawberry and Pineapple Preserve
3 quarts strawberries 2 cups water 1 pint pineapple, shredded 5 pounds sugar Cook the pineapple in the water about twenty minutes; add the sugar, and when boiling, the strawberries. Cook twenty minutes.
Strawberry and Green Gooseberry Preserves 3 quarts strawberries 1 quart green gooseberries 1 cup water 6 pounds sugar Cook the gooseberries in the water slowly five or six minutes; add the sugar, and when it is dissolved, the strawberries, and let cook ten to twenty minutes.
Two open-kettle preserves have run together on this page: strawberry with pineapple, and strawberry with green gooseberry. Both work on the same logic — cook the firm, pectin-bearing fruit first, then add strawberries last so they hold their shape.
- The hinge: strawberries go in lastStrawberries are low in pectin and collapse quickly. The pineapple or gooseberries are simmered first to soften them and release their juice and acid (the gooseberries also bring plenty of pectin; pineapple does not); the berries only ride along at the end. Do not stir hard once they are in or you will end up with jam rather than whole-fruit preserve.
- Quantities in modern terms3 quarts of strawberries is roughly 4 to 4.5 lb hulled, or about 12 cups. A pint of shredded pineapple is 2 cups, or roughly half a medium fresh pineapple. Five pounds of sugar is about 11 cups; six pounds is about 13.5.
- Pineapple"Shredded" here means grated or torn on the coarse side of a grater, not canned crushed pineapple. Canned works, but drain it and count the syrup as part of the water, since it is already sweetened.
- Green gooseberriesUnderripe gooseberries are the point — they are very high in pectin and acid, which is what sets the strawberries. Ripe red ones will not gel as reliably. Top and tail them; the fruit is sold frozen in the UK and at some US farm stands in early summer.
- Judging doneness rather than the clockTwenty minutes at a hard boil is a guide, not a set point. Test with a thermometer at 220F (or 8F above the boiling point of water where you live), or chill a spoonful on a cold plate and see whether it wrinkles.
- Pan sizeWith 5 to 6 lb of sugar in play the mixture foams up hard as it boils. Use a wide preserving pan of at least 8 quarts; a tall stockpot both boils over and evaporates too slowly.
- SealingThe book assumes the open-kettle method — pour boiling preserve into hot jars and seal. Current practice is to leave 1/4 inch headspace and process half-pints in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes, adjusting for altitude.
- YieldEach version makes at least 10 half-pint jars, depending on how far the batch is reduced.
Pairing strawberries with a second fruit was a practical answer to a chemical problem long before pectin was sold in boxes: strawberry preserves made alone tend to be thin and syrupy, so cooks stretched them with something tart and gel-prone. Green gooseberries are often said to have been the English partner of choice, cheap and abundant at the same moment in early summer; pineapple was the newer, more fashionable option, increasingly available to American kitchens as imported and canned fruit spread. That both appear on one page of an American preserving manual of this era is telling — the first household pectin extract, Certo, a liquid rather than a powder, appeared only in the mid-1910s, so books of this generation still taught the cook to source her pectin from the fruit itself.