Skip to main content
Dessert

Strawberry Preserves

A sweet preserve made by cooking strawberries with sugar and lemon juice until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Wash and hull the strawberries.

Cook

  1. In a pot, combine strawberries, sugar, and lemon juice.

  2. Cook over medium heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

  3. Increase heat and boil for 10-15 minutes until thickened.

Jar

  1. Pour into sterilized jars and seal.

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

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fresh strawberries
Provide the fruit, pectin and flavour that form the body of the preserves.
Sugar
Dissolves into the fruit juice, sweetening the preserves and helping them thicken as they boil.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and supports the set of the preserves.

The step that matters

Boiling until thickened. Preserves set as water evaporates and sugar and pectin concentrate. Boiling too briefly leaves them runny, while overcooking can make them stiff once cooled.

“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.

More strawberry preserves recipes

Sun-Dried 4 See all 80 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes