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Strawberry Preserves
Pick over, wash, drain, and hull strawberries; then weigh. Fill glass jars with berries. Make a syrup same as for Damson Preserve, cooking the syrup fifteen minutes. Add syrup to overflow jars; let stand fifteen minutes, when fruit will have shrunk, and more fruit must be added to fill jars. Screw on covers, put on a trivet in a kettle of cold water, heat water to boiling-point, and keep just below boiling-point one hour.
Raspberries may be preserved in the same way. 8 lbs. pears 4 lbs. sugar
This is a whole-fruit preserve processed in a sealed jar held deliberately below boiling for an hour. The method, the jar hardware and the sugar ratio it depends on all belong to a different kitchen, and the text as printed does not contain enough information to reproduce it safely.
- The process never reaches a reliable temperatureHolding sealed jars "just below boiling-point" for an hour is a sub-boiling pasteurisation, not a boiling-water bath. Modern practice for high-acid fruit calls for a full rolling boil for a measured time, because water below 212F cannot be verified without a thermometer in the kettle and the hold time here is not matched to any jar size.
- The syrup quantity is missingThe syrup is cross-referenced to Damson Preserve rather than given, and the trailing line reads "8 lbs. pears 4 lbs. sugar", which appears to belong to a different recipe. Nothing on this page tells you the sugar-to-fruit ratio for strawberries, and in a preserve the sugar concentration is what suppresses mould and yeast.
- Jars are sealed before processing"Screw on covers" and then heating implies a period screw-band jar sealed with a rubber ring, of a kind that could vent and reseat as it cooled. Modern two-piece lids behave differently under a fully tightened band, and the two systems are not interchangeable.
- No headspace, no seal testThe instruction is to fill "to overflow." There is no headspace allowance and no direction to check that the lid has pulled down after cooling, so a failed seal would go unnoticed until the jar spoiled.
- Strawberries are acidic, which limits but does not remove the riskHigh-acid fruit makes botulism unlikely; the realistic failures here are mould, wild yeast fermentation and lid failure. That is a spoilage problem rather than a lethal one, but an under-processed jar stored for months is not worth the gamble.
- If you want to make strawberry preservesUse a current tested recipe with stated sugar weights, jar sizes, headspace and boiling-water-bath times.
- Reading the recipe as history"Pick over" means sorting out stems, leaves and bruised fruit before washing -- an ordinary step when berries came from a field rather than a punnet.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devotes a substantial section to canning and preserving because in the 1890s a household's fruit supply for the winter was made, not bought, and strawberries — with their notably short season — were among the fruits most worth capturing whole. The method here is a preserve rather than a jam: the berries are kept intact in a heavy syrup instead of being cooked to a pulp, which is why the fruit shrinks and the jars must be topped up. Fannie Farmer's book is remembered for standardising level measurements, but its canning chapter shows the limits of that project; safe home preserving depends on processing temperatures and times that were difficult to control reliably in a domestic kitchen of the period, and the science behind them was not settled until well into the twentieth century. The cross-reference to Damson Preserve, and the stray pear-and-sugar line left dangling at the end, are ordinary features of a book assembled from many short entries and reset through edition after edition.