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Raspberries, Preserved Whole
Gather the raspberries on a dry day when the sun is not upon them. Strip off the stalks, weigh the fruit, and allow three pounds of sugar for four pounds of fruit. Boil the sugar with a very small quantity of water till it is quite clear, put in the raspberries, and simmer them gently for five minutes. Lift them out carefully, and drain them. Boil the syrup till small beads appear on its surface, put in the raspberries, boil them another five minutes, take them up, and drain them again. Boil the syrup till large bubbles are formed, put in the raspberries a third time, and when taking them out be especially careful, or they will break. Put them at once into perfectly dry jars or glasses, and cover them closely to exclude the air. Store in a cool airy place.
A Victorian whole-fruit preserve, in which the berries are candied in stages rather than boiled to a pulp. Almost everything here is aimed at one result: fruit that keeps its shape.
- Why three short boilsEach five-minute simmer lets sugar penetrate the fruit gradually while the syrup thickens between rounds. A single long boil would collapse the berries into jam, which is exactly what this recipe is trying to avoid. Lift the fruit with a wide slotted spoon or skimmer, never a fork.
- Reading the syrup stages"Quite clear" means the sugar has fully dissolved. The later cues are visual, not thermometric, and the recipe gives no temperatures: "small beads on the surface" indicates a syrup somewhere in the thread range, and "large bubbles" a stage boiled further and thicker still. If you use a thermometer, keep the syrup below soft-ball (about 235F) or it will set hard around the fruit.
- The sugar ratioThree pounds sugar to four pounds fruit is about 75 percent by weight, lower than the pound-for-pound standard of most jams. That is enough to candy the berries but not enough to guarantee an indefinite shelf life on its own.
- Fruit selectionUse firm, just-ripe or barely underripe raspberries; fully ripe berries have already begun to soften and are the likeliest to break during the repeated boils. Gathering on a dry day, out of the sun, keeps surface water off the fruit and the berries cool and firm rather than slack.
- The syrup is not wasteThe syrup -- Note that the recipe packs the berries drained, into perfectly dry jars, with no syrup added; the result is closer to candied fruit than to fruit in syrup. If you prefer to pack them in syrup instead, the reduced syrup can be poured over the fruit in the jars, and any surplus keeps in the refrigerator for soda water or puddings.
- Sealing, updatedThe original asks only for "perfectly dry jars" covered "to exclude the air," relying on the sugar rather than on a heat seal. Use sterilised canning jars and either process filled jars in a boiling water bath for ten minutes, or skip processing and keep them refrigerated and use within a month.
- EquipmentA wide, low preserving pan or heavy stainless saucepan gives the evaporation the syrup stages depend on. A deep narrow pot will take much longer to reach each stage and the fruit will suffer for it.
- YieldHard to pin down: four pounds of raspberries, drained as the recipe directs, will fill several half-pint jars, and more again if you choose to pack them in syrup. Have extra jars ready.
Cassell's belongs to the last decades of the nineteenth century, when British home preserving was transformed by cheap sugar: the sugar duties were repealed in 1874, and a commodity that had been carefully rationed in the still-room became something a middle-class household could buy by the stone. Whole-fruit preserves like this one sit between jam and the older confectioner's craft of candying, and they were certainly harder to make than jam. A raspberry kept intact through three boilings, and a dish of whole berries in clear syrup, looked entirely different on the table from a spoonful of pulp. The staged method itself is much older than the book, descending from still-room manuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.