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Strawberry Preserves

A sweet preserve made by boiling strawberries with sugar and water, then jarred with brandy to prevent mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Strawberry Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a 4-quart granite pan, combine 3 pints of sugar with enough water to moisten without making it watery.

  2. Place the pan on the back of the stove to dissolve the sugar.

  3. Once dissolved, bring to a boil, skimming off any froth before and after adding the fruit.

Cook the fruit

  1. Add 3 pints of strawberries and boil for 20 minutes, or until a few drops of syrup thicken when cooled.

  2. Transfer the cooked fruit to a crock and let it cool to plump the fruit.

Pack and seal

  1. Pack into self-sealing pint jars, covering with fitted white paper dipped in brandy to prevent mold before sealing.

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 + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, with the boiling, thickens the syrup into a preserve.
Strawberries
Provide the fruit, flavor and pectin-bearing body that the cooked syrup sets around.
Brandy
Dampened paper on the surface helps discourage mold on the top of the preserves.

The step that matters

Testing the syrup with a drop. Boiling concentrates the sugar and water evaporates; the drop-on-cold-plate test shows when the syrup will set. Too short a boil leaves the preserve runny, and too long makes it stiff or candied.

“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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