Name: Fruit Preserves
Ingredients: 3 pounds fruit; 1 pound sugar; 1 pint water

Fruit Preserves

Ingredients

3 pounds fruit
1 pound sugar
1 pint water

Directions

Combine sugar and water in a pot.
Add the fruit and cook slowly for 1 hour.
Put the cooked fruit into jars.
Strain the syrup over the fruit in the jars.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Fruit: Provides the bulk and flavor of the preserves as it cooks down in the syrup.
Sugar: Sweetens the preserves and helps set the fruit by thickening the syrup as it cooks.
Water: Dissolves the sugar to form the syrup that cooks the fruit.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.