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Strawberry Preserves
Use the best berries that they may need no washing.
Allow a pound of sugar for each pound of fruit and place together over a slow fire with no water. Do not mash in stirring and when skimming is required set on back of stove that scum may rise before trying to remove it. When sugar is dissolved boil fast for thirty minutes; remove fruit; place in jars; boil syrup five minutes longer, then pour over the berries and seal.
A whole-berry preserve of the old school: equal weights of fruit and sugar, no added water, no pectin, and the berries lifted out so the syrup can be reduced separately. The technique still works, but the timings and the sealing belong to a different era.
- Thirty minutes is far too longThirty minutes at a fast boil is longer than most modern recipes call for -- A pound-for-pound strawberry preserve sets at about 220F, roughly 8F above the boil at sea level, which on a modern burner may take only 10-20 minutes of hard boiling. Boiling well past that point will darken the syrup and toughen the berries. Cook to temperature rather than to the clock.
- Lifting the fruit outThis is the point of the method and worth keeping. Skimming the berries out once they are translucent, then reducing the syrup alone, keeps them whole instead of collapsing into jam. It is the same logic as a modern macerate-and-drain preserve.
- "A slow fire"Low heat until the sugar has completely dissolved, with no water at all -- the berries release their own juice. Any undissolved crystal on the pan wall will seed the whole batch and make the syrup grainy.
- SealingOpen-kettle sealing -- pouring hot preserve into jars and closing them -- was common practice in the period and is no longer recommended. Fill clean hot jars leaving 1/4 inch headspace and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, or skip the canning entirely and keep the jars in the refrigerator, where a full-sugar preserve lasts for months.
- Unwashed berriesThe instruction assumes fruit clean and sound enough to go straight into the pan; washing adds water to the syrup and bruises the fruit. Rinse supermarket berries, then dry them thoroughly on towels and hull them before weighing.
- SkimmingMoving the pan to the cooler back of a wood range let the boil subside so the scum could gather. On a gas or induction hob, cut the heat to a bare simmer for a minute and the foam will collect at the centre where a spoon can take it. A small knob of butter also breaks the foam.
- YieldTwo pounds of berries with two pounds of sugar gives roughly four half-pint jars, depending on how far the syrup is reduced.
Equal-weight preserving was a common proportion in nineteenth-century American household books because sugar, not heat, was doing much of the preserving: at around 60 percent sugar by weight the syrup binds enough water to make it far harder for mould and yeast to grow, though osmotolerant yeasts and surface moulds can still spoil a jam, which is precisely why sealing mattered. The insistence on berries so good they need no washing marks this as a recipe written for households with their own fruit, or with access to a market where strawberries arrived the same day -- the berry does not travel well, and until refrigerated rail cars became common the strawberry season was short, local and intense. A family might have to deal with a whole crop in the space of two or three weeks.