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Strawberry Preserves
Put two pounds of sugar in a bright tin-pan over a kettle of boiling water, and pour into it half a pint of boiling water; when the sugar is dissolved and hot, put in fruit, and then place the pan directly on the stove or range; let boil ten minutes or longer if the fruit is not clear, gently (or the berries will be broken) take up with a small strainer, and keep hot while the syrup is boiled down until thick and rich; drain off the thin syrup from the cans, and pour the rich syrup over the berries to fill, and screw down the tops immediately. The thin syrup poured off may be brought to boiling, and then bottled and sealed, to be used for sauces and drinks.
A whole-fruit preserve rather than a jam: the berries are cooked briefly, lifted out, and the syrup reduced without them so they stay intact. Everything else follows from that.
- The hingeRemove the berries as soon as they look clear and boil the syrup down on its own. Leaving them in while the syrup thickens is what turns whole-fruit preserves into a pan of pulp.
- Fruit quantity is not givenTwo pounds of sugar with a half pint of water would suit roughly two pounds of hulled strawberries; pound-for-pound sugar to fruit is a common proportion in preserves of this period, though period books vary. Much more fruit and the syrup will be harder to reduce to the "thick and rich" stage described.
- "Bright tin-pan over a kettle of boiling water"A clean, unstained pan set over simmering water, i.e. an improvised double boiler, used to dissolve the sugar gently without scorching; the fruit goes in over the water bath too, and only then does the pan move to direct heat for the boiling. Any wide nonreactive pan works.
- No pectin, no lemonSet comes from sugar concentration alone. Strawberries are low in pectin and acid, and this style of preserve is meant to be soft and syrupy rather than firmly jelled, so the syrup is judged by eye ('thick and rich') rather than by a thermometer; modern jam practice would look for something near the standard jell point.
- "Cans" means glass jarsIn 1880s American usage these are screw-top glass jars with zinc lids and rubber rings. Modern two-piece lids are not "screwed down immediately" but tightened only to fingertip snug.
- Sealing methodFilling hot jars and sealing without further processing is open-kettle canning, which current practice no longer accepts because the seal itself is unreliable and the surface can mould. Either process the filled jars in a boiling water bath according to a current tested procedure, or treat the result as a refrigerator preserve and use it within a few weeks.
- The thin syrupWorth keeping, as the book says, but bottling and sealing it by the same method has the same problem. Chill it and use it within a week or two in drinks and over puddings, or freeze it.
- YieldIf two pounds of fruit are assumed, expect roughly a couple of pints of preserve plus some drained thin syrup; the recipe gives no fruit quantity, so any figure is an estimate.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the large family of late nineteenth-century American compilations built on the same skeleton as Estelle Woods Wilcox's Midwestern Buckeye Cookery, reissued with Southern additions and a Southern title for a Southern market; the meticulous, slightly fussy tone of this preserve entry is characteristic of that lineage. Preserving whole strawberries was a point of pride precisely because it is difficult: sugar draws water out of a berry fast, and prolonged boiling collapses it, so the cook is instructed to divide the work and reduce the syrup separately. Cane sugar had become cheap enough by the 1880s for households to put up fruit in pound-for-pound proportions, and the closing note about saving the thin syrup for "sauces and drinks" reflects a kitchen in which nothing sweet was poured down the drain.