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STRAWBERRY JAM (another way)
Pick the strawberries, carefully look out and discard all that are unsound, and weigh the fruit. Boil it, stirring occasionally to keep it from burning, for half an hour, then mix in thoroughly, off the fire, half a pound of loaf sugar broken into small pieces for each original pound of fruit. Boil the jam quickly half an hour longer, or till it will set, and put it into jars in the usual way. Time to boil the fruit, half an hour without the sugar, and half an hour with the sugar.
A late-Victorian jam made with half the sugar modern recipes use, and boiled twice as long. Both facts follow from the same thing: no added pectin, and a fruit that has very little of its own.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a solid cone, chipped and broken as needed; ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight. Preserving sugar, with its larger crystals, dissolves more evenly and throws less scum.
- The sugar ratio is lowHalf a pound of sugar per pound of fruit is roughly half what a modern jam recipe calls for. That is why the boiling is so long, and it also means the finished jam keeps less well and tastes markedly more of fruit than of sweetness.
- Strawberries will not set on their ownStrawberries are low in both pectin and acid, which is the hinge of this recipe. The hour of boiling is an attempt to force a set by evaporation alone; the juice of a lemon per two pounds of fruit, or a proportion of redcurrant juice, does the same work in a fraction of the time.
- Test rather than timeIgnore the clock at the second stage and use the wrinkle test: a spoonful on a chilled saucer, left a minute, should wrinkle when pushed. A sugar thermometer reading 220F (105C) tells you the same thing.
- Use a wide panA preserving pan or wide, heavy stockpot gives the surface area that makes evaporation possible. In a tall saucepan the hour of boiling will scorch the base before the jam thickens.
- "In the usual way"Victorian practice meant hot jars, a disc of waxed paper on the surface and a cover tied over the top. Current practice is hot sterilised jars with two-piece lids, processed in a boiling water bath for ten minutes. Given the low sugar, treat any jar you do not process as a refrigerator jam and use it within a month.
- YieldThe recipe is given as a proportion rather than a quantity, so scale to what you have: half a pound of sugar for each pound of fruit weighed before cooking. Expect a variable number of half-pint jars depending on how far you reduce it.
Cassell's gives several strawberry jams in succession, and this one is the thrifty variant: the fruit is boiled down hard before any sugar goes in, so less sugar is needed to reach a set. Sugar was cheap by the time the book appeared compared with earlier in the century, but preserving was still a domestic economy rather than a hobby, and a household putting up the summer glut of a kitchen garden counted pounds carefully. The two-stage boil also reflects a period without commercial pectin, which was not sold to home cooks until the twentieth century; before that, a cook either chose fruit rich in pectin, such as currants, gooseberries or apples, or boiled a poor setter like the strawberry until enough water had gone. The result, then as now, is a jam of good flavour and uncertain set, which is why so many old books offer strawberry jam "another way."