Skip to main content
Preserve

Strawberries, Preserved in Wine

Preserved strawberries in wine are made by layering strawberries, sugar, and sherry or Madeira in bottles and sealing them.

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

Why it works: Sugar and sherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,141 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Strawberries, Preserved in Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Gather strawberries in fine weather and use them immediately.

  2. Prepare dry glass bottles and soft corks.

  3. Remove the stalks from the strawberries and place them in the bottles.

Fill and seal

  1. Sprinkle the sugar among the strawberries.

  2. When the fruit reaches the neck of the bottle, fill it with sherry or Madeira.

  3. Cork the bottles with new corks and dip them in melted resin.

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 + sherrytop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,141 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberries
Provide the fruit that is preserved and gives the flavour and colour of the finished wine.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws moisture from it, helping preserve the berries in the wine.
Sherry or madeira wine
Covers the fruit and adds alcohol and flavour, which help keep it from spoiling.

The step that matters

Fill the bottles with wine only to the neck. Fruit left exposed to air can spoil, so the bottle must be full of wine up to the neck. Sealing with new corks and resin then keeps air out for long storage.

“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.

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes