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Canned Strawberries
Miss Blaikie.
After the berries are pulled, let as many as can be put carefully in the preserve kettle at once, be placed on a platter. To each pound of fruit add three-fourths of a pound of sugar; let them stand two or three hours, till the juice is drawn from them; pour it in the kettle and let it come to a boil, and remove the scum which rises; then put in the berries very carefully. As soon as they come thoroughly to a boil put them in warm jars, and seal while boiling hot. Be sure the cans are air tight.
This is a thick, syrup-heavy strawberry preserve rather than what we would now call canned fruit, and the method it uses to seal the jars has been superseded. Everything about the fruit handling is still sound.
- The hinge: macerate first, boil brieflyDrawing the juice out with sugar over two or three hours, then boiling that juice alone before the berries go in, is what keeps the berries whole. Once the fruit is in the kettle it should be brought just to a full boil and no further; a long boil collapses strawberries into jam.
- "After the berries are pulled"Picked, and used the same day. Ripe but firm fruit holds its shape; overripe berries will disintegrate no matter how carefully you handle them.
- The proportionsThree-quarters of a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is 12 oz sugar per 1 lb berries, roughly 1 3/4 cups granulated sugar. That is a preserving ratio, not a modern light jam, and the sweetness is doing preservative work.
- Preserve kettleA wide, heavy, non-reactive pan. Width matters more than depth here, since evaporation from a broad surface lets the syrup thicken without a prolonged boil.
- Sealing has changed"Seal while boiling hot" is open-kettle canning, which relied on the heat of the syrup to sterilise the lid and pull a vacuum as it cooled. Current practice for fruit preserves is to fill clean hot jars, apply two-piece lids, and process in a boiling-water bath, then check the seal after cooling. Strawberries are high-acid and heavily sugared, so the risk of an unprocessed jar is mould and fermentation rather than anything worse, but the jar can and does fail.
- "Cans"For a book of this period this means glass jars with zinc caps and rubber rings, or tin cans sealed by a tinsmith. The instruction to be sure they are airtight was practical advice for hardware that frequently was not.
- ScumThe foam that rises as the juice boils is mostly trapped air and fine impurities carried up from the fruit. Skimming it gives a clearer syrup; leaving it does no harm beyond appearance.
- YieldNot given. Refrigerate anything that has not sealed and use it within a few weeks.
Strawberry preserving occupies a great deal of space in nineteenth-century American cookbooks because the season was short and sharply local: strawberries do not dry well and they do not keep. Recipes like this one sit at the moment when domestic glass jars with screw-on zinc caps had become cheap enough for ordinary households, and the printed instructions still read as advice about a fairly new technology, hence the repeated insistence that the cans be airtight. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago from contributions by named local women, and the attribution to Miss Blaikie is typical of the book's method: it is a collection of what particular households actually did, which is why several barely different strawberry recipes can appear within a few pages of one another. The sugar-first maceration used here, letting the fruit give up its juice cold before any heat is applied, is an old preserver's trick that survives unchanged in modern strawberry jam recipes.