To Preserve Strawberries Whole
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the strawberries
Select the finest scarlet strawberries before they are too ripe, keeping their stalks on.
Lay the strawberries separately on a china dish.
Sprinkle twice their weight of sugar over them.
Make the syrup
Bruise a few ripe strawberries and mix them with an equal weight of sugar in a china bowl.
Cover the bowl and place it in a saucepan of boiling water until the juice thickens.
Strain the mixture through muslin into a saucepan.
Boil the strained mixture and skim off any foam.
Preserve and serve
When cold, add the whole strawberries to the syrup.
Warm them gently without boiling, repeating until the strawberries become clear.
Cool them down.
Transfer the strawberries to glasses and pour the syrup over them.
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
- Doubly refined sugar
- Draws water out of the fruit and preserves it, giving the strawberries sweetness and a syrup that sets.
- Ripe strawberries
- Provide the flavour and juice that is thickened into the syrup around the whole fruit.
- Finest scarlet strawberries
- Whole, unbruised fruit that keeps its shape and appearance through the preserving process.
The step that matters
Warming without boiling. Boiling the fruit would break down its structure and make it soft and ragged. Gentle, repeated warming lets sugar slowly replace the water in the strawberries, so they stay whole and turn clear.
“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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