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Strawberry Jam
Thoroughly pick twenty-five pounds sound, ripe strawberries. Place twenty-five pounds granulated sugar in a large copper basin with a quart cold water and a tablespoon vanilla essence, set basin on open fire, cook until sugar begins to bubble on surface, then drop in strawberries all at once. Gently stir with wooden spoon for a minute, being careful not to mash them, then cook for five minutes. Remove basin to table, lift up strawberries with a skimmer and place in warmed-up jelly glasses, but only half fill. Reset basin on fire, boil for five minutes more, fill up glasses with syrup and let thoroughly cool. Place a piece of wax paper lightly dipped in brandy on top of jam, tightly close glasses, place in a cool place and use when desired. Before jam is placed in glasses be very careful to warm them up a little to prevent breaking.
This is a professional-scale confiture written for a hotel kitchen: fifty pounds of finished preserve, cooked in an open copper basin. The method is sound and the scale is not.
- Scale it downDivide by ten and you have 2 1/2 lb strawberries, 2 1/2 lb sugar, a scant 1/2 cup water (about 6 tablespoons) and a generous 1/4 teaspoon vanilla. Equal weights of fruit and sugar is a classic preserving ratio and holds at any size.
- The copper basinA copper preserving pan conducts heat evenly and was standard in professional kitchens; if unlined, acidic fruit can pick up copper from it. Use a wide stainless or enamelled pan; width matters as much as material, since evaporation is a large part of what sets the jam.
- The hinge: fruit out, syrup onThe whole point of the method is that the berries are lifted out after five minutes and the syrup alone is boiled down. That is what keeps the fruit whole instead of collapsing into pulp. Do not stir hard, and do not let the berries sit in the boiling syrup while it reduces.
- Expect a loose setStrawberries are low in pectin, and ten minutes of total boiling may well not carry the syrup to the jelly point of 220F. Expect a soft preserve of whole berries in heavy syrup, closer to a confiture than a spreadable jam. If you want it firmer, boil the syrup to 220F before returning it to the glasses.
- Jelly glassesThese were small tumblers, on the order of a half-pint each, closed with a cover rather than a screw lid. Any half-pint jar works. Warming them first, as directed, still applies whenever hot syrup meets glass.
- The brandy paperA round of waxed paper dipped in spirit was the period defence against surface mould, and it works only in a genuinely cold larder. This jam is not heat-processed, so treat it as a refrigerator preserve: cool, cover, chill, and use within a couple of months. For shelf-stable jars, follow current water-bath processing times.
- VanillaA tablespoon of extract in this quantity of jam is a background note, not a flavour. Scaled down it is a generous 1/4 teaspoon; add it at the end rather than at the start, since alcohol-based extract loses aroma over an open fire.
- YieldThe full recipe fills many dozens of half-pint glasses. The tenth-scale version gives six or so.
Filippini wrote for the kind of kitchen where twenty-five pounds of strawberries was an ordinary morning's work, and this entry reads like a brigade recipe copied straight out of a hotel preserving book. The technique itself is older than the volume: French confituriers had long distinguished between jam, where the fruit is cooked into a mass, and the whole-fruit preserve, where the berries are barely poached, lifted clear, and the syrup reduced separately so the fruit keeps its shape and colour. The brandy-soaked paper laid over the surface was standard household practice on both sides of the Atlantic before reliable vacuum sealing, and generally worked on the principle that alcohol and a low-oxygen surface discouraged the moulds that inevitably found an open glass of jam. The instruction to warm the glasses is a reminder of how thin and brittle pressed jelly tumblers were compared with modern jars.