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Strawberries, Preserved
The fruit must be gathered in very dry weather, when there has been no rain for at least two days. Take equal weights of loaf sugar broken into pieces and picked fruit. Barely cover the sugar with cold water, and add a pinch of cream of tartar. Melt the sugar, put it on the fire, and boil it until a little of it which has been dropped from the end of a spoon into some very cold water can be rolled into a soft ball, which is not at all sticky. When the sugar has reached this condition put the strawberries into it, cover the pan, and leave it for an hour. Place it on a quick fire, boil it for two minutes, skim it well, and it is done. There is another method of preserving strawberries or raspberries which is very much approved. Pick the fruit, and press it with a wooden spoon through a coarse sieve. Weigh it, and allow a pound of sugar to every pound of pulp. Boil the sugar, and as soon as it has attained the fourth degree (see SUGAR BOILING) mix the pulp with it. Let it stand for five minutes, stir it over the fire till it boils, and it is done. If liked, the sugar, instead of being boiled, may be crushed to powder and incorporated with the pulp, which must then be put into bottles, and boiled as in STRAWBERRIES, BOTTLED. There is another mode of preserving them whole, by placing them, when they are freshly gathered, into glass pickle-bottles, strewing their weight of sifted sugar over as they are put in, and filling up the bottles with either boiling-hot malaga wine or boiling sweet malmsey. This is the most expensive, though the least troublesome. (See next recipe.)
Four methods sit inside this one entry: a whole-fruit preserve in boiled syrup, a sieved pulp jam, an uncooked pulp bottled and heated, and whole berries steeped in boiling fortified wine. The first is the one most worth making, and the syrup stage decides everything.
- The hinge: cook the syrup, not the fruitThe berries go into finished syrup off the boil and sit covered for an hour, then get only two minutes of active boiling. That is what keeps them whole rather than collapsing into pulp. Resist the urge to boil on to a stiff set.
- "Soft ball" in numbersThe cold-water test described here is 235-240F (113-115C) on a thermometer. The second method instead calls for the "fourth degree" of the book's own SUGAR BOILING scale, which is a lower, thinner stage than soft ball; check that entry rather than assuming the two are the same, and trust the water test over the number.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight, and needs no breaking.
- Cream of tartarThe pinch of acid inverts a little of the sucrose and stops the syrup crystallising. About 1/8 teaspoon per pound of sugar is enough. Lemon juice does the same job and adds acidity strawberries lack.
- "A quick fire"High heat, in a wide pan. Use something broad and heavy rather than deep, so the two-minute boil actually reaches a rolling boil across the whole surface.
- Expect a loose setStrawberries are low in pectin and low in acid, and a two-minute boil at 1:1 sugar gives a syrupy preserve with intact berries, not a firm jam. Judge it done by the clock as written, not by a wrinkle test on a cold plate.
- Malaga and malmseyBoth are sweet wines: Malaga from southern Spain, malmsey a sweet Malvasia most familiar today as the sweetest style of Madeira though historically made elsewhere too. A sweet Madeira or a cream sherry stands in. The berries are simply covered with the boiling wine and their own weight in sugar, which makes a dessert conserve rather than a shelf staple.
- Sealing and storageThe original gives no sealing or processing instructions at all. Fill sterilised jars hot, seal, and follow a current water-bath canning schedule for strawberry preserves if you want them shelf-stable; otherwise treat all four versions as refrigerator preserves and use within a month.
- YieldTwo pounds of berries with two pounds of sugar gives roughly five to six half-pint jars, a little less for the sieved-pulp version.
Preserved strawberries were a late-Victorian household ambition rather than a routine chore: sugar was expensive until the sugar duties were finally repealed in 1874, after which home jam-making expanded sharply and commercial jam became a working-class staple. Cassell's gives four methods in a single entry, as dictionary-format cookery books routinely collect variant methods under one head; the fruit is in any case genuinely difficult -- strawberries are watery, low in acid and low in pectin, so they neither set readily nor hold their shape. The insistence on gathering in dry weather, with no rain for two days, is sound practical advice about water content and mould rather than superstition; rain-swollen berries dilute the syrup and spoil faster. The wine method, which the book concedes is the most expensive and least troublesome, belongs to an older tradition of fruit put down in sweet fortified wine, and may be compared to the seventeenth-century "wet sucket" rather than to modern jam; its keeping power comes from sugar and alcohol together.