Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Strawberry Jam
Strawberry Jam
Take some small or crushed strawberries being careful to throw out all the decayed ones, remove the hulls and see that the fruit is clean. Weight it and to every two pounds of fruit add one and one-half pounds of sugar. Put both fruit and sugar into a preserving-pan and crush it slightly with a masher or a wooden spoon. Then put the pan on the stove and let it get hot gradually and boil a little of the jam to put to cool on a saucer, which jellies as it cools. It ought to be stirred occasionally during the boiling and any scum that arises must be taken off. When the jam is done remove the pan from the stove, let it cool a little and put into jars. When quite cold lay a piece of white paper soaked in brandy on the top of each jar and fasten them with a cover of paper dipped in the slightly-beaten white of egg. Keep in a cool, dry place.
A plain uncooked-pectin jam: fruit and sugar, boiled until it sets on its own. Nearly everything here still works, with the exception of the closure at the end.
- The seal is the one thing to replaceBrandy-soaked paper and a cap of paper glued down with egg white was the standard 19th-century closure, and it relies on the jam being eaten within months and inspected often. Fill sterilised jars and process in a boiling-water bath, or simply refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
- Sugar ratioTwo pounds fruit to one and a half pounds sugar is about 75 percent sugar by fruit weight, lower than the equal-weights ratio common in older preserving books. It gives brighter fruit flavour but a softer set and a shorter shelf life.
- Weigh after hullingHull and clean first, then weigh, then calculate the sugar, as the recipe directs. Hulls and stems account for a small but not negligible share of the fruit's weight and will skew the ratio.
- Strawberries are low in pectinThis is why the recipe leans on the saucer test rather than a fixed time. Expect 20 to 40 minutes at a rolling boil, and a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm one. A squeeze of lemon juice per two pounds of fruit helps it come together without changing the character.
- The saucer testChill two or three saucers in the freezer before you start. Drop a teaspoon of jam on a cold one, wait half a minute, and push it with a fingertip: if the surface wrinkles, it is done. A thermometer reading of 220F at sea level tells you the same thing.
- Preserving-pan means wide, not deepUse the widest heavy pan you have and fill it no more than a third. Evaporation drives the set, and a deep narrow pot boils over and scorches before it thickens.
- Do not scale upA larger batch takes disproportionately longer to reach setting point and the colour suffers for it. A few pounds of fruit at a time is the sensible working quantity in a domestic pan.
- Skimming and standingSkim the pink foam as it rises, as the recipe directs, rather than at the end. Letting the jam cool a little before jarring is conventional practice and helps keep pieces of fruit and seeds from floating to the top.
- YieldTwo pounds of strawberries with the sugar given makes roughly three to four half-pint jars.
Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's cookery to print in 1896, was not a chef, and the book's preserving chapter reads more like an English or continental household manual than like hotel work. The closure described here - a round of paper soaked in brandy laid directly on the jam, then a cover of paper brushed with egg white that shrinks tight as it dries - is close to the method Eliza Acton and Mrs Beeton set down decades earlier, and it survived in American books long after the screw-band glass jar had become available. Brandy discouraged surface mould; the egg-white paper acted as a rudimentary shrink seal. Heavy sugar was itself the preservative, and strawberries, among the earliest and most perishable fruits of the season, were an obvious early candidate for the summer jam pan.