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To preserve strawberries whole
Take an equal weight of fruit and double refined sugar, lay the former in a large dish, and sprinkle half the sugar in fine powder; give a gentle shake to the dish, that the sugar may touch the under side of the fruit. Next day make a thin syrup with the remainder of the sugar; and allow one pint of red currant juice to every three pounds of strawberries; in this simmer them until they are sufficiently jellied. Choose the largest scarlets, not dead ripe.
A two-day preserve that leans on redcurrant juice for its set rather than long boiling, which is why the berries stay whole. The overnight sugaring is the part people skip and the part that matters.
- Weigh, don't measureEqual weights of fruit and sugar: 3 lb hulled strawberries to 3 lb sugar, with 1 pint of redcurrant juice (an English pint of the period being 20 fl oz). Use scales, as cup measures of whole berries are meaningless here.
- Double refined sugarThis was among the whitest, most thoroughly clarified loaf sugars available (treble-refined grades also existed), sold in cones and broken down at home. Modern granulated sugar is at least as clean as anything Georgian refiners produced; caster sugar dissolves faster for the first-day sprinkling.
- The overnight sugaring is structuralHalf the sugar drawn through the raw fruit firms the flesh by osmosis so the berries hold together in the syrup. Cut this step and you get jam with the skins floating on top.
- "A thin syrup"Dissolve the remaining sugar in just enough water to make it pourable over gentle heat, then add the currant juice. The recipe gives no proportion of water.
- Redcurrant juice does the settingStrawberries are very low in pectin and acid; redcurrants are high in both. Simmer a pound of currants with a splash of water until burst, then strain through a jelly bag without pressing. Bottled redcurrant juice or the juice from making redcurrant jelly works; sieved frozen currants are fine.
- "Sufficiently jellied"Test at 220F/104C on a sugar thermometer, or spoon a little onto a chilled plate and push it with a finger for a wrinkle. Simmer no longer than needed: the berries collapse and the syrup caramelises if pushed.
- "The largest scarlets, not dead ripe"Scarlets were the small, firm Fragaria virginiana types then common in English gardens. Choose the largest firm-ripe berries of any modern variety, still pale at the shoulders; fully soft fruit will disintegrate.
- Yield and keepingFill hot sterilised jars and seal at once; refrigerate after opening and eat within a few weeks, as the syrup is looser than commercial jam.
Preserving fruit "whole" was the mark of a skilled still-room, and cookbooks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries return to it repeatedly: anyone could boil berries to a pulp, but keeping the shape and colour of a strawberry through a sugar boil showed control. The redcurrant juice here is the technical trick, added long before pectin was isolated or understood, on the plain observation that currants make preserves stiffen while strawberries do not. "Scarlets" refers to the Virginian scarlet strawberries that dominated English fruit gardens before the large-fruited pineapple and Keens' Seedling types displaced them in the nineteenth century, and the instruction to pick them short of full ripeness is the same advice a jam maker would give today. The insistence on double refined sugar reflects a period when sugar came in graded loaves and coarser grades carried enough molasses to muddy the finished colour.