Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Bottled Strawberries
Bottled Strawberries
Remove the stalks from some freshly-gathered ripe strawberries, put them in wide-mouthed glass bottles, and fill them up with syrup that has been boiled to twenty-six degrees; put the bottles, without corking them, into a large saucepan, put in cold water to half their height, and stand the saucepan over the fire. When boiling, move the saucepan, with the bottles, from the fire, and leave them to cool a little. Strain the syrup off the strawberries into a preserving-pan, and one-fourth of the quantity of strained red currant juice, boil it up and skim it. Fill up the bottles with the fruit by emptying one bottle into another, then fill them up with syrup. Cork the bottles, tie them down, and keep in a dry store cupboard.
This is a nineteenth-century bottling method rather than a recipe in the modern sense, and the procedure it describes cannot be made safe by adjusting it. The notes below explain what the instructions mean and where the method fails.
- "Twenty-six degrees"This refers to a syrup hydrometer reading, almost certainly degrees Baume, the scale professional confectioners used for sugar density; roughly a heavy syrup. It is not an oven or thermometer temperature, and the original gives no sugar-to-water ratio at all.
- The seal is the problemCorks tied down with string or bladder are not a hermetic seal. Modern safe bottling depends on a lid that vents during heating and pulls down to vacuum as the jar cools; a cork admits air and microorganisms as the contents contract.
- The jars are opened after processingThe fruit is heated, then the syrup is poured off, boiled separately with the currant juice, and the bottles are decanted into one another and refilled before corking. The syrup at least gets re-boiled, but the fruit and the open bottles are handled in the air after their heat treatment, which undercuts the purpose of the water bath.
- No measured processThere is no jar size, no headspace, no processing time, and no temperature beyond "when boiling", with the water only halfway up the bottles, so the upper part of each bottle is unlikely to reach the temperature of the water bath. Safe fruit canning is specified in minutes at a stated temperature for a stated jar volume.
- Mould and yeast, not botulismStrawberries and red currant juice are acidic enough that Clostridium botulinum is not the primary concern here. The realistic outcomes are surface mould and fermentation from yeasts, which in a corked, tied-down bottle can build enough pressure to force the closure.
- What the currant juice was forRed currants are high in pectin and acid. Adding a quarter part of their juice to the strawberry syrup would have given it body and colour that strawberries alone do not provide, though the original does not say why it is there.
- If you want bottled strawberriesUse a current, tested preserving recipe from a food-safety authority, with stated jar sizes, headspace and processing times.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was assembled while he was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, and it draws on the French professional literature of the period -- which may be why a domestic-sounding page like this one specifies syrup density in degrees rather than cups. The Baume hydrometer was standard equipment in a nineteenth-century confectionery kitchen, where sugar work was graded by density and boiling stage rather than by recipe proportions. Bottling fruit in sealed glass under syrup is generally traced to Nicolas Appert's experiments in France around the turn of the nineteenth century, and by the 1890s the technique was well established in hotel and household kitchens; what was still lacking was settled guidance on processing times, seal integrity and the microbiology involved, much of which came with the agricultural-station canning research of the following decades.