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Preserve

To Preserve Strawberries

Preserve strawberries by cooking them with sugar syrup and optionally adding 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 ↓

To Preserve Strawberries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the strawberries

  1. Gather strawberries in dry weather and remove the stems.

  2. Weigh the strawberries and use 1 pound of sugar for each pound of strawberries.

  3. Sift half the sugar over the strawberries.

  4. Set the sifted sugar aside.

  5. Take inferior or overripe strawberries.

  6. Mix them with equal sugar.

  7. Mash them.

Make the syrup

  1. Heat the mashed strawberries in a basin over boiling water until thick juice forms.

  2. Strain the thick juice.

  3. Mix the strained juice with the remaining sugar.

  4. Boil the mixture until the foam ceases.

  5. Add the whole strawberries and their juices to the syrup.

  6. Heat gently without boiling.

  7. Remove strawberries one by one with a teaspoon.

  8. Spread them on dishes to cool, ensuring they do not touch.

  9. Skim off any scum that forms.

  10. Repeat the cooling process until strawberries are dew-like.

Pack and store

  1. Once cool, pack strawberries with syrup into tumblers or white queen's-ware pots.

  2. Add a layer of apple jelly on top for long-term storage.

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

Strawberries
Provide the fruit that is preserved, with their juice forming the syrup.
Powdered loaf sugar
Sweetens and thickens the juice into syrup, and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Heat gently without boiling. Boiling the whole strawberries would break them apart and toughen their texture. Gentle heat lets them soak up syrup while staying whole, and the sugar concentration is what preserves them.

“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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