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Strawberries, Preserved Whole
Take perfectly sound ripe strawberries which have been gathered in dry weather; pick and weigh them. Put them in layers on a large dish, and sprinkle finely-powdered sugar between the layers-a pound of sugar will be required for every pound of fruit. Let them stand all night. Next day put the whole gently into a clean preserving-pan. Let it boil; shake the pan to keep the strawberries from burning, and pass a spoon round the edges; but be careful not to crush the fruit. Remove the scum as it rises, and boil the fruit gently for a quarter of an hour. Drain the juice from the berries, and boil it separately for half an hour. If liked, a pint of red currant juice boiled to syrup with half a pound of sugar may be added for each pound of strawberries, and this will greatly improve the flavour of the preparation. Pour the boiling juice upon the fruit, put both again into the pan, and boil the mixture for a quarter of an hour, or till the juice will set when a little is put upon a plate. Put the preserved fruit into jars, cover in the usual way, and store in a cool place. Strawberries preserved thus are very good served in glasses, mixed with cream. Probable cost, 4d. to 8d. per pound.
A classic three-stage strawberry preserve: macerate, cook fruit and syrup separately, then reunite them. The point of the method is whole berries suspended in a set syrup rather than jam, and everything in the instructions serves that end.
- The hinge: cook the juice, not the fruitStrawberries collapse if boiled long in their own syrup. Draining the juice off after fifteen minutes and reducing it alone for half an hour is what lets the syrup thicken while the berries stay intact. Do not shortcut it by boiling everything together to setting point.
- Sugar ratioEqual weights, pound for pound. That is a genuine preserving ratio, not a matter of taste — the sugar concentration is what makes the finished jars keep. Reducing it changes the product into something that must be treated as a refrigerator jam.
- Why the currant juiceStrawberries are low in both pectin and acid and set poorly on their own. Redcurrant juice supplies both, which is why the recipe promises it will "greatly improve" things. A pint of currant juice per pound of fruit is a large addition; half that still helps the set and leaves the strawberry flavour dominant.
- Setting pointThe plate test given here works, but a thermometer is quicker: 220F / 105C at sea level. Chill the test plate in the freezer first, push the cooled blob with a fingertip, and look for a wrinkled skin.
- Overnight macerationThe layered sugar draws juice out of the berries and firms their flesh, so they hold shape in the pan. Cover the dish and leave it somewhere cool; a full night is not excessive.
- The preserving-panA wide, shallow, unlined copper or heavy stainless pan. Wide matters more than heavy — evaporation happens at the surface, so a stockpot will take far longer to reach set. Never use unlined aluminium or cast iron with this much fruit acid.
- "Cover in the usual way"In this period that meant a waxed paper disc laid on the hot surface and a parchment cover tied over the rim, with the jars kept in a cold larder. For a modern cupboard, fill sterilised jars hot, seal with two-piece lids and process in a boiling water bath, or skip that and keep the jars in the refrigerator.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of fruit and two pounds of sugar gives roughly four to five half-pint jars; adding the currant syrup increases the yield. The suggestion of serving it in glasses with cream is worth taking literally -- it is closer to a compote than to breakfast jam.
- The cost lineFourpence to eightpence a pound is pre-decimal British currency. It is a period detail, not a figure that converts usefully.
Cassell's belongs to the era when a household with a garden or a nearby market faced a glut of soft fruit for a few weeks each summer and had to convert it into something that would last the year. Whole-fruit preserves of this kind were valued above ordinary jam because the berries kept their shape and could be served as a dessert in their own right, spooned into glasses with cream, rather than merely spread on bread. The redcurrant addition reflects an old and practical piece of kitchen knowledge that long predates the isolation of pectin in the early nineteenth century and the arrival of commercial pectin extract in the early twentieth: cooks knew empirically that currants, apples and gooseberries made other fruits set, and reached for them without knowing why. Strawberries were among the most troublesome fruits to preserve for exactly this reason, and nineteenth-century cookery books are often said to give considerable attention to methods for keeping them whole.