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Preserved Strawberries
Put two pounds of strawberries at the bottom of a preserving-pan, pour over two breakfast cupfuls of red or white currant juice, cover with finely-crushed loaf sugar and again with a sheet of paper, place the pan at the side of the fire and let it remain until the strawberries are slightly warm. Remove the pan from the fire, take the strawberries out carefully with a wooden spoon and put them on a sieve to drain. Add a little more sugar to the syrup, boil it to the pearl degree, put back the fruit and let it simmer gently for a few minutes. Remove the strawberries, put them carefully into a basin, pour over the syrup and let them remain for a couple of days. Take them out again, drain, put the syrup back in the pan, add a little more sugar and a small quantity of currant juice and boil again to the pearl degree, put in the strawberries, simmer for a few minutes, put them carefully into jars, pour the syrup in so as to not quite fill the jars, let them get cold, cover over first with paper soaked in brandy, then with thick paper or a bladder, put the jars in a cool place and let them remain until wanted. For preserving strawberries only the largest fruit should be used.
This is a French-style confiture where the berries are candied in stages rather than boiled into jam, and every instruction is bent toward keeping them whole. Translating the sugar vocabulary and the fireside heat is most of the work.
- The hinge: never boil the fruitThe strawberries are only ever warmed through or simmered "a few minutes" in finished syrup; the syrup is boiled alone. If you let the berries come to a rolling boil at any stage they collapse and you have jam instead of preserved whole fruit.
- "The pearl degree"An old sugar-boiling stage just above the thread stage, when the surface breaks into small round bubbles like pearls; sources place it variously between roughly 220 and 235F. Modern jam-setting temperature is in the same neighbourhood, so a candy or instant-read thermometer can stand in for the eye.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones or blocks, which is why the recipe says finely crushed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute; the recipe never states quantities, so the amount at each of the three additions is left to judgement.
- Breakfast cupfulsA breakfast cup is generous, commonly reckoned at around 10 fluid ounces or more, so two cupfuls is somewhere between 2 and 2 1/2 cups of currant juice. Fresh currants are seasonal; bottled unsweetened red currant juice works, and the point of it is pectin and acid, not flavour alone.
- "At the side of the fire"The coolest spot on a coal range, holding the pan well below a simmer. Use the lowest burner setting or a 200F oven and stop as soon as the berries are warm to the touch and beginning to weep juice.
- Why the fruit rests two daysSoaking in hot syrup and standing lets sugar move into the berries by osmosis while they stay intact, which is exactly what a hard boil cannot do. Skipping the rest gives pale, shrunken fruit in thin syrup.
- The paper coverA sheet of paper laid on the fruit during warming keeps the surface from drying and the sugar from crusting. Parchment or a lid left slightly ajar does the same job.
- Sealing and storageBrandy-soaked paper and a bladder were the period's mould defence, not a hermetic seal. Treat the finished result as a fresh preserve: cover it, keep it refrigerated, and use it within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure if you want it shelf-stable.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield; two pounds of berries with their syrup will fill several jars, the syrup deliberately left short of the rim as written.
The sugar stages (thread, pearl, ball, crack) are the confiseur's ladder, judged before thermometers were standard in kitchens by dipping the fingers in cold water. Preserving whole fruit in successively stronger syrup, rather than cooking it to a pulp, was the confiturier's method, which fits the instruction to use only the largest berries. Currant juice as a partner to strawberries is an old and practical pairing: strawberries are low in pectin and acid, currants are high in both, so the syrup sets and keeps colour without any added commercial pectin, which was not on the market for the domestic cook when this was written. The bladder tied over the jar mouth, an animal membrane that shrinks tight as it dries, was still ordinary sealing practice in the late nineteenth century even as glass jars with screw rings were spreading.