Preserves
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Use a granite or porcelain-lined kettle and a wooden or granite spoon.
Sterilize jars by boiling them in cold water.
Make the syrup
Prepare syrup by cooking sugar and water together, using 1 cup of water for each pound of sugar and adjusting for juicy fruit.
Weigh the fruit and add sugar equal to one-third its weight for canning, or from ¾ to full weight of the fruit for preserving.
Cook and fill
For soft fruits, drop them into the syrup and bring to a boil.
For hard fruits, cook in boiling water until soft before adding to syrup.
Skim the fruit while cooking.
Fill jars with hot fruit at boiling point.
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
- Fresh fruit
- Provides the main body, flavor and pectin-bearing structure of the preserve.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the preserve and helps preserve it by binding water and inhibiting spoilage.
- Water
- Dissolves the sugar to form the syrup that the fruit cooks in.
The step that matters
Skim the fruit while cooking. Foam and impurities rise to the surface as fruit cooks, and removing them keeps the preserve clear and prevents off flavors. Skimming should be done steadily throughout cooking.
“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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