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Claret and Strawberries
(France.) Dissolve 1/4 pound sugar in a pint of claret, or more, if needed, to sweeten, pick sufficient strawberries, cover with this and set on ice for an hour before use. Eat with crackers and cream cheese.
A maceration rather than a cooked dish, so the only real variables are the wine, the sweetness, and how long the fruit sits in it. Everything hinges on not letting the berries go past an hour.
- ClaretIn an English or American book of this period claret means dry red Bordeaux, or something sold as its equivalent. Any dry, medium-bodied red with decent acidity works; avoid heavily oaked or high-alcohol wines, which flatten the fruit.
- Quarter pound of sugarAbout 113 g, or roughly 9 tablespoons of granulated sugar. That is quite sweet for a pint of wine, and the recipe's "or more, if needed" invites you to taste rather than measure. Dissolve it cold, stirring, before the fruit goes in.
- A pintTwo cups if you are reading this as American, 20 fl oz if the book's measure is imperial. The recipe sets no quantity of fruit; the exact volume matters less than the berries being submerged.
- Set on iceRefrigerate, do not freeze. The original means a bowl nested in ice, which holds the fruit just above freezing without ice crystals forming in the berries.
- The hour is a limit, not a minimumThe hour -- The recipe gives an hour on ice. Sugared wine draws water out of strawberries fairly quickly, so a shorter steeping leaves fruit that is stained and perfumed but still firm, while long steeping softens the berries and thins the syrup.
- Cream cheese in 1902Not the stabilised block cheese sold under that name now, but a fresh, loose, unripened cheese closer to Neufchâtel, fromage blanc or a mild farmer's cheese. Use one of those if you want the intended contrast of cool, faintly sour, and unsweetened.
- CrackersPlain unsweetened water biscuits or a thin cracker with no seasoning — they are there as a vehicle for the cheese, not as a sweet accompaniment.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of fruit and no yield; serve spooned into glasses or shallow bowls with the syrup poured over. The wine is never cooked, so both berries and syrup retain the alcohol.
Strawberries steeped in sweetened red wine is a long-standing French and northern Italian way of handling fruit that is ripe but not perfect — the wine and sugar rescue underflavoured berries and lend colour to pale ones. Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) collected dishes country by country, and the "(France.)" tag at the head is doing the work of a whole headnote: readers were presumably meant to understand this as a continental habit worth importing. The pairing with crackers and fresh cheese rather than cake or cream is the most telling detail. The cream cheese of 1902 was a fresh, perishable, locally made product; the shelf-stable version most cooks now reach for did not yet dominate the market.