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Sunshine Strawberries
Put into the preserving kettle, in layers, as many pounds of sugar as of hulled, washed, and drained strawberries. When the juice is drawn out a little, set over the fire to cook twenty minutes after boiling commences. Turn the berries into agate pans or earthen plates, cover with panes of glass and set in the sun. Let stand two days, stirring two or three times each day. Store without reheating in jars or glasses.
The time of cooking may be cut down to ten minutes, if the fruit be left in the sun a day or two longer. Seal the glasses with paper caps as for jelly.
Yellow Tomatoes or Cape Gooseberry and Pineapple
A sun preserve: the berries are cooked only briefly, then finished by evaporation under glass in full sunlight, which keeps them whole and bright red instead of dark and jammy. The sun is doing the work of a long boil, so the weather matters as much as the stove.
- The hinge: sun, not stoveThe short boil is only meant to draw and thicken the syrup; the concentration that preserves the fruit happens over the two days outdoors. Attempt this only in a run of clear, hot, dry days (85F and above), and bring the pans in at night so dew does not thin the syrup back out.
- Pound for poundEqual weights of hulled berries and sugar. Two pounds of prepared strawberries with two pounds of sugar is a practical batch. Weigh after hulling, not before.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan — stainless or enameled cast iron. Width matters more than depth here, since you want evaporation and gentle movement rather than a deep rolling boil that breaks the fruit.
- Agate pansAgate ware is speckled enameled steel. Any shallow non-reactive dish works: glass baking dishes or ceramic platters, filled no more than half an inch deep so the syrup thickens evenly.
- Covering with glassPanes of window glass propped over the dishes trap heat and keep insects off while letting moisture escape at the edges. A sheet of glass or a fine screen raised on chopsticks does the same; plastic wrap sealed tight does not, because the water has nowhere to go.
- Timing trade-offTwenty minutes of boiling and two days of sun, or ten minutes and three to four days — the original is explicit that one substitutes for the other. Stop when the syrup coats a cold spoon and the berries are translucent and slightly shrunken.
- Paper caps are not a sealPaper covers of this kind were long standard in home preserving and are no longer considered adequate; mold and yeast take hold under them. Because these preserves are never reheated or processed, treat them as a refrigerator preserve in clean lidded jars and use them within a few weeks, or freeze them.
- Stray line at the end"Yellow Tomatoes or Cape Gooseberry and Pineapple" is a running heading for the next entry in the book, not an ingredient in this one.
Sun preserves appear all through late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American preserving manuals, usually under names like "sunshine strawberries" or "strawberries preserved in the sun," and they were prized for exactly the quality long-boiled preserves lacked: whole berries that kept their shape and a clear red color rather than the brownish set of fruit cooked down for an hour. Drying fruit and syrup in the sun is also long-standing practice around the Mediterranean and the Middle East.