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Strawberries, to Preserve Whole
-INGREDIENTS.-To every lb. of fruit allow 1½ lb. of good loaf sugar, 1 pint of red-currant juice. AVERAGE COST, in full season, 6d. per lb.
Choose the strawberries not too ripe, of a fine large sort and of a good colour.
Pick off the stalks, lay the strawberries in a dish and sprinkle over them half the quantity of sugar, which must be finely pounded. Shake the dish gently, that the sugar may be equally distributed and touch the under-side of the fruit, and let it remain for 1 day. Then have ready the currant-juice, drawn as for red-currant jelly; boil it with the remainder of the sugar until it forms a thin syrup, and in this simmer the strawberries and sugar until the whole is sufficiently jellied. Great care must be taken not to stir the fruit roughly, as it should be preserved as whole as possible. Strawberries prepared in this manner are very good served with thin cream.
TIME.- hour to 20 minutes to simmer the strawberries in the syrup.
SEASONABLE in June and July.
Strawberry, Open Tart of, or any other Kind of Preserve. - INGREDIENTS.-Trimmings of puff-paste, any kind of jam.
Butter a tart-pan, roll out the paste to the thickness of 1/2 an inch, and line the pan OPEN TART. with it; prick a few holes at the bottom with a fork, and bake the tart in a brisk oven from 10 to 15 minutes. Let the paste cool a little; then fill it with preserve, OPEN TART MOULD. place a few stars or leaves on it, which have been previously cut out of the paste and baked, and the tart is ready for table.
By making it in this manner, both the flavour and colour of the jam are preserved, SUET PUDDING. which would otherwise be lost, were it baked in the oven on the paste; and, besides, so much jam is not required.
TIME.-10 to 15 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Two recipes run together here: a whole-fruit strawberry preserve set with red-currant juice, and a way of using puff-paste trimmings as an open jam tart. Both are workable, but the preserve depends on one thing the text never spells out.
- The hinge: currant juice is the pectinStrawberries are very low in pectin and acid, which is why this preserve cannot set on its own. The pint of red-currant juice per pound of fruit is the setting agent, not a flavouring, and it cannot be left out or replaced with water.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a solid cone and broken or pounded as needed. Ordinary granulated or preserving sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight; no need to pound anything.
- "Drawn as for red-currant jelly"That means simmering red currants gently with a little water until they collapse, then straining through a jelly bag without pressing. Roughly 2 lb of currants gives about a pint of juice. Frozen currants work and release juice readily.
- "Sufficiently jellied"Judge the syrup, not the fruit. It has set when it reaches 220F/105C, or when a spoonful on a chilled saucer wrinkles under a fingertip. Overshooting turns the syrup to caramel and the berries to leather.
- The garbled timeThe printed "TIME.- hour to 20 minutes" has lost a fraction in the setting; given the 20-minute upper limit, a quarter-hour is the likeliest reading. Twenty minutes at a bare simmer is about all a lightly underripe berry can take before it slumps.
- Keeping the fruit wholeDo not stir. Shake the pan, or lift and turn the berries with a slotted spoon at most. A wide shallow pan helps, as the syrup reduces faster and the fruit sits in a single layer.
- Yield and storageBeeton gives no yield and no sealing method; pot into hot sterilised jars and seal at once, and treat any jar that does not hold a firm vacuum as a refrigerator preserve to be eaten within a few weeks.
- "A brisk oven" for the tartThat is 425-450F/220-230C, which is right for puff paste. Line the tin, prick the base, and weight it or the trimmings will lift the whole floor of the tart.
- Why the jam goes in coldBeeton's point is sound and still worth following: baking jam in the shell drives off the fresh flavour and darkens the colour. Bake the case and the pastry stars separately, cool, then fill.
Preserving whole fruit rather than mashing it to jam is often said to have been a mark of the accomplished nineteenth-century housekeeper, and strawberries were the hardest test of it, being soft, watery and almost devoid of pectin. The currant-juice trick predates any chemical understanding of pectin: cooks seem to have known simply that red currants made things jelly, and borrowed that quality for fruits that would not set alone, a practice that appears in English preserve books well before the word pectin entered the kitchen. The costing of sixpence a pound "in full season" is a reminder that strawberries were a June and July affair in Beeton's day, cheap for a few weeks and unobtainable the rest of the year, which is precisely why the preserving pan came out. The open tart that follows belongs to the same economy of a well-run kitchen: trimmings of puff paste were too valuable to waste, and a shell filled with the previous summer's jam turned scraps into a dish that is, as the entry drily notes, seasonable at any time.