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STRAWBERRIES, PRESERVED WHOLE (another way)
Pick and weigh the berries, and put them in layers on a dish with finely-powdered sugar interspersed amongst them, using a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit. Leave them until the next day, put them gently into a preserving-pan, and when the juice is just about to boil turn all into a colander, and drain off the juice. Let it boil, then pour it upon the fruit, and leave it until the next day. Put it again on the fire, let it reach the point of boiling once more, and again pour it out. Strain it, let it get cold, then pour it on the fruit, and repeat this process for four or five days. Put the fruit into jars, cover these, and store for use. A pint of red currant juice for six pounds of fruit, boiled to syrup with half a pound of sugar, and added to the juice during the last boiling, will greatly improve the flavour of this preparation. Time, five days.
A slow, low-heat preserve designed to keep the berries whole and plump rather than reduce them to jam. The technique is sound, but nothing here is a shelf-stable canning process, and that is the one point worth acting on.
- The hinge: never let the fruit boilOnly the drained juice is boiled; the berries themselves are heated just to the point where the juice begins to move, then removed. Boiling the fruit collapses the cells and you get jam. Watch the pan and pull it at the first tremor of bubbles.
- Why it takes five daysEach cycle of hot syrup driven into cold fruit exchanges a little water for a little sugar. Rushing it by boiling the whole mass together shrivels the berries and turns them dull. The long schedule is doing the work heat would otherwise ruin.
- Finely-powdered sugarThis means caster (superfine) sugar, not modern confectioners' or icing sugar, which contains cornstarch. Ordinary granulated works, but caster dissolves faster in the overnight maceration.
- Preserving-panA wide, heavy, unlined copper or a broad stainless pan. Wide matters more than deep: a large surface lets the syrup concentrate quickly during its brief boils. Avoid aluminium and unlined cast iron, which react with the fruit acid.
- Red currant juiceNot merely for flavour. Red currants are high in pectin and acid, and the addition helps the syrup set to a light body and keeps the colour bright. Note that the recipe does not add it raw: the strained currant juice is first boiled to a syrup with half a pound of sugar, then stirred into the juice at the last boiling. A pint to six pounds of fruit is roughly 570 ml to 2.7 kg.
- Storage is the weak point"Put the fruit into jars, cover these" describes a cold-filled jar with a paper or wax cover, which is not a seal. Even at this sugar concentration the surface will mould in a warm cupboard. Fill hot, sterilised jars and water-bath process, or simply keep the finished jars in the refrigerator and use them within a couple of months.
- Choosing berriesSmall, firm, slightly underripe fruit survives five days of syruping; large soft supermarket strawberries slump. Hull them but keep them dry, as surface water dilutes the syrup.
Preserving fruit whole by repeated short boilings of the syrup is a confectioner's technique rather than a jam-maker's, and it long predates this book: the same method appears in English and French household manuals through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Strawberries are notoriously low in pectin and only moderately low in acid, which is why Cassell's suggests the red currant juice; before commercial pectin was available, cooks routinely borrowed setting power from currants, apples or lemon. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a vast alphabetical compendium of the late Victorian and Edwardian kitchen, characteristically gives several "another way" versions of a single preserve, on the assumption that a household would choose according to the fruit it had and the labour it could spare. Five days of attention for a few jars of whole berries tells you something about both.