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Strawberry Preserve

A sweet preserve made by cooking strawberries with sugar and optional currant juice until firm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and white currant work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. The science ↓

Strawberry Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and hull the strawberries.

  2. In a large pot, combine strawberries and sugar.

  3. If using, add white currant juice.

Cook

  1. Boil the mixture quickly for 25 minutes.

  2. Stir constantly and skim off any foam.

  3. Check the consistency; it should be firm and not overly sweet.

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 + white curranttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberries
Provide the fruit flavor and most of the bulk of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, with heat, thickens it so the preserve sets.
White currant juice
Adds tartness and natural pectin to help the preserve set.

The step that matters

Checking the consistency. Fruit preserves thicken as water evaporates and sugar concentrates. Stopping too early leaves the preserve runny, while cooking too long can make it stiff and overly sweet, so the set should be judged by testing rather than by time alone.

“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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