Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Strawberry Conserve
Strawberry Conserve
Take some fresh and very ripe strawberries, pick them over, crush them in a cloth and wring out the juice. To each dessertspoonful of juice allow six ounces of sugar. Boil the sugar to the pearl degree, then remove it from the fire and pour the juice into it, and, if necessary, a little carmine. Stir it with a wooden spoon until the conserve begins to get dry and white, then put it into moulds or paper cases.
Despite the name, this is not a preserve in the jam sense. It is a sugar confection in the old apothecary style: a boiled syrup grained with a very small amount of fruit juice and cast into moulds, closer to a fondant tablet than to anything you would spread on toast.
- The ratio is not a misprintA dessertspoonful is about two teaspoons, roughly 10 ml, against six ounces (170 g) of sugar. The juice is a flavouring, not a body; the finished sweet is sugar that has been persuaded to crystallise fine and pale.
- "Pearl degree"In the old sugar-boiling scale, pearl sits just above thread, usually given as somewhere around 220-225F (roughly 105-107C), though the manuals do not agree closely on the figure; the test was small round bubbles rising across the surface and a drop drawn between finger and thumb pulling a short thread that beads. A thermometer is the easier modern guide.
- The hinge is the stirringEverything depends on beating the syrup with a wooden spoon off the heat until it clouds and stiffens. That agitation forces small crystals rather than large ones, which is what makes the mass turn white and opaque. Stop too early and it stays syrupy.
- Add the juice off the fireThe instruction to remove the pan before pouring in the juice matters: cold juice hitting boiling syrup on the heat will spit, and acid in the juice may work against the syrup graining cleanly.
- CarmineCarmine is cochineal, a red colouring made from scale insects, still sold as a food colour and still labelled as such. A drop of modern red colouring does the same job; presumably it is there because the small quantity of juice gives little colour of its own.
- Wringing in a clothA doubled square of muslin or a jelly bag gives clear juice. Straining crushed berries through a fine sieve works as well, but press hard rather than rubbing pulp through, since solids will interfere with the crystal structure.
- Moulds and paper casesWork fast once the mass whitens, as it sets within a minute or two. Small silicone moulds, petit-four cases or a shallow oiled tray you can cut into squares all serve. Six ounces of sugar yields roughly a dozen small sweets.
- KeepingStore airtight and dry. These take up moisture from the air and go sticky within days in a humid kitchen; they are not a preserve and will not keep like one.
Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf appeared in 1896, and it absorbed a good deal of French professional confectionery alongside hotel cookery. "Conserve" here carries its older sense, inherited from the apothecary's shop, where a conserve was a medicinal or cordial substance held in sugar rather than a fruit spread; sugar was the preservative and often the point. Confectioners' manuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are full of these grained sugar tablets flavoured with a spoonful of juice or an essence, cast in paper cases and served with dessert or coffee. The sugar-boiling degree named in the recipe -- pearl -- belonged to the working vocabulary of the trade before thermometers were common in kitchens, each such degree identified by a test done with wet fingers or a wire loop, and they survived in print long after the instruments that replaced them arrived.