Home › The Principles of Cookery › Strawberries, Preserved in Wine
Strawberries, Preserved in Wine
Take the fruit when perfectly ripe and fresh; pick it, and put it immediately into dry wide-mouthed bottles. Sprinkle amongst it four ounces of powdered sugar with each pound of fruit, and let the bottles be filled to the neck. Pour in good sherry or Madeira to cover the fruit. Cork the bottles securely, wax them down, and store in a cool dry place.
A cold-pack fruit preserve that relies on sugar and fortified wine rather than heat. It works, but only if you respect what it is: a short-keeping steeped fruit, not a shelf-stable canned good.
- The hinge: this is not a sealed, sterilised preserveNothing here is heated, so the wine and sugar are doing all the preserving work, and the juice from the berries dilutes the alcohol well below the level that halts yeast. Keep the jars in the refrigerator, use them within a month or two, and discard anything that smells yeasty, fizzes, or shows mould on the surface.
- Do not wax down a rigid sealA corked and waxed bottle can push its cork or seep at the wax if pressure builds, whereas a modern airtight jar has nowhere to vent. Use a clip-top or screw-band jar and leave the band finger-tight rather than cranked down.
- "Powdered sugar"In Victorian usage this means ordinary sugar ground fine, the equivalent of today's caster or superfine sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Four ounces per pound of fruit is about 115 g sugar to 450 g berries, or a generous half cup to a pound.
- Sherry or MadeiraUse a genuine fortified wine at 17 to 19 percent, dry to medium: an oloroso, an amontillado, or a Sercial or Verdelho Madeira. Cooking sherry with added salt will ruin the fruit, and an unfortified table wine at 12 percent has neither the strength nor the flavour weight.
- Choose the berries for the jobModern supermarket strawberries are bred large and soft and will slump into pink mush within days. Small, firm, fully coloured fruit, picked dry and left whole and unwashed if clean, holds its shape far better. Hull them but do not hollow them out.
- Wide-mouthed bottlesThe point of the wide mouth is getting whole berries in and out without crushing them. A straight-sided wide-mouth canning jar is the nearest modern equivalent; fill so the wine covers the fruit completely, since any berry above the liquid will brown and mould.
- Timing and appearanceThe fruit is worth eating after two or three weeks, when the sugar has drawn the juice out and the wine has turned deep red. Colour fades toward brick and brown with longer keeping, which is normal but not attractive; make small quantities often rather than one large batch.
- Yield and servingA pound of whole fruit with wine to cover needs a jar of about a quart, and serves six as an accompaniment. Spoon the berries and their syrup over ice cream, junket or plain sponge, or use the reddened wine on its own as a soaking liquid for trifle.
Preserving fruit whole in spirits or fortified wine was standard practice in British and continental households long before reliable home canning, and it survives in the German Rumtopf and in the brandied cherries and peaches of nineteenth-century American cookbooks. Sherry and Madeira turn up often in Victorian recipes of this kind because both were widely available in the British market, Madeira in particular having been shipped in quantity for generations and reputed not to spoil in transit. Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century, and entries like this one preserve the older logic: sugar and alcohol together hold the fruit, the fruit in turn flavours the wine, and the household ends up with two things from one jar. Recipes of this sort were often a way of using a garden glut, though this one's own instruction to store in a cool dry place suggests some keeping was expected.