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Strawberries in the Sun
2 pounds berries 2 pounds sugar 3/4 cup water Put the syrup in the preserving kettle; bring it to a boil and cook for about ten minutes, or until it begins to thicken. Add for about ten minutes, or until it begins to thicken. Add the berries; cook for ten minutes and pour them out in shallow dishes or meat platters. Cover with sheets of glass, allowing a little air for ventilation; place in the sun until the juice is thick and syrupy . This will take two days or more, but the rich color and delicious flavor of the fruit will fully repay the effort expended. Put into small jars or tumblers and cover according to directions.
A sun preserve rather than a cooked jam: the brief boil sets the syrup, and evaporation in the sun does the rest. The text has a printer's error, repeating the line "for about ten minutes, or until it begins to thicken" — there is only one such stage.
- The hingeThe berries are cooked only ten minutes, in already-thickened syrup, so they stay whole and keep their shape and colour. Boiling them longer to reach a gel breaks them down and gives you ordinary jam; the thickening is meant to happen slowly outdoors.
- Quantities2 lb of hulled strawberries is roughly 6-7 cups; 2 lb of sugar is about 4 1/2 cups. Yield depends on how far the syrup reduces in the sun; expect three or four half-pint jars.
- The syrup firstSugar and 3/4 cup water are boiled about ten minutes, until the recipe's "begins to thicken." A candy thermometer takes the guesswork out of that phrase; thread stage, around 230F, is a reasonable target, though the book gives no temperature.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy pan; copper or enamelled iron in period kitchens. Any broad stainless or enamelled pot works; width matters more than depth because you want fast evaporation.
- Shallow dishes and glassSpread the fruit no more than an inch deep on rimmed platters or sheet pans, and prop the glass on small blocks so air moves across the surface. Two full days of hot, dry sun is the minimum; humidity or cloud will stall it, and the fruit should be brought indoors overnight rather than left to collect dew.
- What can go wrong outdoorsInsects, birds and airborne yeasts are the real hazards, not the sugar. If the surface ferments, smells alcoholic, or shows any fuzz, discard the batch — the syrup is not concentrated enough at the start to guarantee protection while it sits open.
- Covering the jars"Cover according to directions" points to instructions elsewhere in the book, most likely paraffin poured over the top in tumblers, which is no longer recommended: wax shrinks, cracks and lets mould in. Treat this as a refrigerator preserve, in clean jars with tight lids, and use it within a couple of months.
Sun preserving is one of the oldest ways of concentrating fruit, and it survived in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century for strawberries in particular, because the berry is fragile and loses both colour and shape under a long boil. Setting the fruit out in glass-covered platters does the reducing that a kettle would do, but at low heat, so the berries stay whole and the red stays bright rather than turning to the brownish tone of hard-boiled jam. It is a technique that assumes a household with reliable summer sun, a flat roof or a porch railing, and someone at home to carry the trays in at dusk, the domestic labour Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf book was written for. She closes by promising that the effort will be "fully repaid", worth the two days of attention it asks for instead of one afternoon.