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Strawberry Preserves

A sweet preserve made by cooking hulled strawberries with sugar and sealing in jars with alcohol‑wet paper and egg white paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Make the preserves

  1. Place hulled strawberries in a preserving kettle.

  2. Add 1 pound of sugar to the berries.

  3. Heat slowly until boiling, then boil for 15 minutes.

  4. Skim off any foam and pour into small jars or tumblers.

Seal the jars

  1. The next day, cover with a paper wet in alcohol.

  2. Seal with a dry paper pasted down using slightly beaten egg white.

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 + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberries
Provide the fruit, flavour and bulk that the preserves are built around.
White sugar
Sweetens the preserves and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out moisture.

The step that matters

Heat slowly until boiling, then boil for 15 minutes. Heating slowly lets the sugar dissolve evenly before the mixture boils, reducing scorching on the bottom of the kettle. The boil then thickens the syrup by evaporating water, which sets the preserves.

“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.

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