Miss Corson's practical American cookery and household management

Three or four hours before they are to be bottled, or, if the weather is cool, the night before, remove the hulls from freshly picked berries. As the berries are hulled, place them in earthen dishes, adding sugar plentifully, as if preparing them for immediate use on the table. Be careful to add the sugar so that it will be mixed through the berries without having to stir them. Set the dishes away in a cool place. When ready to bottle them, pour off the juice which the sugar will have extracted from the berries ; place it in a kettle, adding a little water, in the proportion of one small cupful to four quarts of juice ; this will be about the quantity that will evaporate from the juice while boiling. As soon as the juice is boiling, put in enough berries to fill one bottle. Stir them down very gently ; let them stay in about two minutes, then lift out with a strainer, so as to take no juice with them ; fill the bottle two-thirds full, and place it in a pan of hot water to keep warm. Proceed in the same way until all the berries have been used, taking only enough for one bottle at a time. Then fill each bottle up with the boiling juice, put a teaspoonful of sweet olive-oil in the neck (the secret of the famous Wiesbaden preserved fruits), and seal quickly. Put up in this way, strawberries keep their color and taste. The oil prevents the penetration of any air to the fruit. STRA WBERR Y-JAM. Use small or crushed berries, carefully rejecting all decayed ones; prepare them as directed for preserves, and allow three-quarters of their weight in sugar ; crush the berries and sugar in the preserving-kettle with a potato- masher or a wooden spoon, and then heat them together and boil them for about half an hour, or until a little jam cooled on a saucer looks thick and clear ; remove all scum as it rises ; when the jam is done, cool it, and put it up as directed in the recipe for strawberry preserves. Another method of making the jam is to crush the berries and sugar together, and let them stand two or three hours before cooking them. FLORIDA ORANGE MARMALADE. Grate off the yellow rind of nine large oranges ; add to the grated rind the juice of three large lemons ; remove the thick white rind from the grated oranges, and all the rind from nine more ; weigh the eighteen oranges, and allow an equal weight of white sugar. Put the grated rind, lemonjuice, and sugar over the fire, and let them boil ; meantime free the pulp and juice of the oranges from all the white skin, and add them to the boiling sugar ; boil the' marmalade slowly until a little of it cooled on a saucer jellies. Put it away as directed in the recipe for other marmalades. PRESERVED TOMATOES. Use small yellow tomatoes, perfectly ripe and sound ; pour boiling water over them, and then peel them, being careful to keep them entire. Weigh the tomatoes, and allow an equal quantity of sugar ; to each pound of sugar use half a lemon thinly sliced, the seeds being removed ; put the sugar and lemons into the preserving-kettle, with just enough water to moisten the sugar, and slowly heat it until it dissolves ; boil it and skim it until it is clear ; then put in the tomatoes, and boil them gently for three-quarters of an hour. Cool the tomatoes, and then put them up as directed in other preserve recipes.