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Strawberry Jelly
Pick the stems off twenty-five pounds very fresh, ripe, sound strawberries, place in a mortar and pound almost to a pulp. Remove, place in an enamelled pan, pour in a quart cold water, mix well with spatula and cook on fire until well melted. Press juice through fine sieve into a basin, strain through cheesecloth into a copper basin, and add a pound granulated sugar for every quart of juice. Mix well until sugar is melted, boil for a few minutes, mix and skim off scum once in a while from surface. Take up a few drops with skimmer and drop on a cold plate; if drops are thick and do not spread out like water the jelly is cooked; if drops fall out like water cook for a few minutes longer. Remove, pour into lightly warmed and wiped jelly glasses and let rest in a cool place for four hours. Cover with wax paper lightly dipped in brandy, replace covers and keep in a cool place.
A professional-scale preserving formula: twenty-five pounds of fruit assumes a hotel range and a copper preserving pan. The proportions scale down cleanly, but strawberries are the one fruit that fights a cook on setting.
- The hinge: strawberries barely setStrawberries are low in both pectin and acid, so juice boiled with sugar alone often finishes as a thick syrup rather than a jelly. Traditional practice was to include a proportion of underripe berries, or the juice of a lemon or two per quart, to give the boil something to gel with; commercial pectin does the same job faster.
- Scaling downTwenty-five pounds of berries will yield somewhere in the region of eight quarts of juice, and at a pound of sugar per quart that is a very large batch. Five pounds of fruit with a scant cup of water is a manageable domestic version; do not boil more than about six cups of juice at once, since deep pans set slowly and unevenly.
- Mortar and enamelled panThe pounding is only to break the fruit so it gives up juice; a potato masher or a few pulses in a food processor does it. Enamel was used because it does not react with fruit acid; the copper basin was valued for even heat in sugar boiling. Enamelled cast iron or stainless steel is the modern equivalent. Untinned copper should not be left sitting with acidic fruit.
- "Cook until well melted"This means heating the crushed fruit until it collapses and the juice runs freely, five to ten minutes at a bare simmer. Longer cooking of the pulp dulls the colour and the fresh flavour that makes strawberry jelly worth the trouble.
- StrainingPress through the sieve if you like, but the second pass through cheesecloth should be by gravity only. Squeezing the bag drives fine pulp through and gives a cloudy jelly.
- The cold-plate testSound advice, and still the best test. Keep a couple of saucers in the freezer, pull the pan off the heat while you test, and look for a drop that wrinkles and holds its edge. A thermometer reading of about 220F at sea level, or 8F above your local boiling point, tells you the same thing.
- Timing"Boil for a few minutes" is optimistic for a domestic batch; expect ten to twenty minutes of hard boiling for the syrup to reach setting concentration. Skim the foam near the end rather than throughout, and stir enough to keep the bottom from catching once the syrup thickens.
- Sealing and storageThe brandy-dipped wax paper was a mould inhibitor, not a seal, and jelly stored this way relies on a cold larder and being eaten within the season. For shelf storage today, fill sterilised half-pint jars, leave a quarter inch of headspace and process in a boiling-water bath; otherwise treat the jars as refrigerator jelly and use them within a month.
- YieldReckon on roughly one half-pint jar for every cup of juice you started with.
The technique here — the copper basin, the pound of sugar to the quart of juice, the round of brandied paper laid over the surface — is standard nineteenth-century preserving practice, and the same brandied-paper trick appears in English and French household manuals. The brandy was believed — reasonably, given that alcohol suppresses surface mould — to protect the jelly through a season in a cool store room. The scale suggests the recipe was not written for a family: twenty-five pounds of berries is a bulk market purchase, bought at the height of a short local season when strawberries were cheap and had to be turned into something that would keep. Jelly, strained clear of every scrap of pulp, was the most genteel of the results.