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Strawberry Jam
For each pound of berries take three fourths a pound of sugar. Put the berries, carefully hulled, washed, and drained, over the fire.
Let heat slowly till they are softened throughout. If eight quarts or more are to be made, pour off a pint of juice and can for some other use. Break up the berries with a slitted wooden spoon, then add the sugar and let cook until thick. Store either as canned fruit or as jelly. a
A bare-bones proportional recipe from the era before commercial pectin, when jam was set by boiling alone. The proportions work, but the finishing point is left entirely to the cook's judgement.
- The hinge: cook to 220F"Until thick" means until the boiling syrup reaches 220F (8 degrees above the boiling point of water), or until a spoonful sheets off rather than dripping in separate drops. Strawberries are low in pectin, so this stage is what makes or breaks the set; pull it early and you have sauce.
- The proportionThree-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of fruit is about 1 1/2 cups sugar to a pound of hulled berries. Modern preserving tends toward equal weights, which sets faster and keeps better. At this lower ratio expect a longer boil, a looser jam and a shorter shelf life once opened.
- Work in small batchesThe instruction about eight quarts assumes a large preserving kettle. In a domestic pan, cook no more than 2 to 3 lb of fruit at a time in a wide, heavy pot. Deep masses of jam take much longer to reach 220F, and the fruit darkens in the meantime.
- The pint of juiceDrawing off a pint of thin juice from a large batch shortens the boil considerably. It is worth doing at any scale: reserve the liquid, chill it as a drink, or reduce it separately for a syrup rather than canning it as the original suggests.
- Slitted wooden spoonA slotted or pierced wooden spoon, used here to crush the softened berries while liquid drains through. A potato masher does the same job. Crush rather than puree; visible pieces of fruit are the point of jam as opposed to butter.
- Heat slowly, without sugarWarming the berries alone first draws out their juice and softens the skins. Sugar added at the start tends to firm the fruit, making it harder to break down later.
- Sealing"Store either as canned fruit or as jelly" most likely points to the two period options: jars processed in a boiling-water bath, or glasses sealed under melted paraffin. The recipe does not specify. Paraffin sealing is no longer recommended — the wax cracks and admits mold. Follow a current tested water-bath processing time for jam, or simply refrigerate and use within a month.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of finished jam per pound of berries, depending on how far you reduce it. Two pounds of fruit fills about three half-pint jars.
This is preserving stripped to arithmetic, and the arithmetic is the recipe: fruit and sugar by weight, no pectin, no lemon, no thermometer. Books of this kind, produced by the American domestic-science movement, assumed a reader who knew what thick jam looked like on a spoon and needed only the ratio and the order of operations. Strawberries were a fixed point in the household preserving calendar, the first substantial fruit of the year and one of the most perishable. The offhand mention of eight quarts is a reminder that this was volume work, not the three-jar weekend batch the same recipe produces now. Commercial pectins made the long judgement-based boil optional and changed the standard sugar ratio upward: liquid pectin extract reached the American market around 1918 to 1920, with powdered pectins following appreciably later.