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Dessert

Preserved Strawberries

Preserved strawberries are sweet berries soaked in sugar syrup and optionally apple jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Preserved Strawberries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the strawberries

  1. Gather strawberries in dry weather, leaving their stalks on, and lay them separately on a dish.

  2. Sift double the weight of sugar over the strawberries.

  3. Bruise a few overripe berries.

Make the syrup

  1. Mix the bruised berries with an equal weight of sugar in a bowl.

  2. Cover the bowl and place it in a pot of boiling water until the juice thickens.

  3. Strain the juice through muslin into a preserving pan.

  4. Boil the juice.

  5. Skim the surface.

  6. Let the juice cool.

  7. Add the whole strawberries to the syrup.

Cook and pack

  1. Warm them gently without boiling.

  2. Remove from heat to cool.

  3. Repeat warming until the strawberries are clear.

  4. Once cooled, transfer strawberries to jars or glasses.

  5. Pour a little apple jelly over if desired.

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 + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh strawberries
Provide the fruit that is preserved and set in the sugar syrup.
Double refined sugar
Draws moisture out of the fruit and acts as a preservative, keeping the berries sweet and firm.
Apple jelly
Adds natural pectin and a light glaze to help the preserve keep longer.

The step that matters

Warming without boiling. Boiling the strawberries breaks their skins and softens the flesh. Gentle warming lets sugar slowly penetrate the fruit, and repeated cooling and warming lets the berries become clear and hold their shape.

“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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