I spent some time over the weekend hunkered down with a stack of old cookbooks, tracking down a recipe for a reader. As it happens, I struck pay dirt, and I also kicked up quite a bit of dust in the process. Some of the sources I consulted, old fund-raising church and charity cookbooks that my mother had collected from the ’40s through the ’70s, had not had their pages turned in decades.

Here’s the note, from Jeanne Ellermeier, that got me started:

Many years ago a Swedish friend told me how to make “sunshine strawberry jam.” I’ve long since lost the proportions, and hope you can help. Fresh berries were washed, and I think a hot simple syrup was added to them. I don’t think they were cooked at all. They were then spread out in a shallow glass dish, covered with a pane of glass and placed in the sun. Every day they were turned, and eventually, the berries absorbed all of the juice. They were very plump and tasted like they had just been picked. I never had any jam that was as good. Have you ever heard of this?

I have now.

I thought this would be an easy puzzle to solve, because I knew that my mother had latched onto some Swedish church cookbooks from Lindsborg, which contained old-style recipes. Sadly, however, they contained none for jam or preserves. I did find a herring salad recipe, the very thing for a summer luncheon  but we’ll save that for another occasion.

As I moved on to other cookbooks and read recipe after recipe, I noticed that old family recipes for jam and preserves often skipped the steps that involved canning. While I do not want to reignite our recent debate about the merits of canning versus other methods of food preservation, let me just note that many of our culinary forebears processed fruit by triggering some sort of chemical reaction and then pouring the concoction into a jar, screwing on the lid and calling it good.

Cases in point are the large number of formulas I ran across that called for placing fresh fruit, often peaches, in a crock and dousing the fruit with brandy. The cook then placed a plate over the top of the crock and set it off to the side in a cool place, perhaps for a period of two months.

This bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the fate of leftovers that get pushed to the back of my refrigerator from time to time, but the cool place referred to was undoubtedly a room-temperature kind of cool place, not one in an appliance.

But I digress.

While I found one recipe in a hospital auxiliary cookbook that called for letting boiled strawberries stand for two days on dinner plates or platters, I did not stumble onto Sunshine Strawberry Preserves until I turned to James Beard’s “American Cookery,” a 30-year-old cookbook that contains a number of historical recipes. If you want to know how to make a boiled New England dinner the way it was prepared 300 years ago, this is your source. I’ve quoted his instructions verbatim.

Sunshine Strawberry Preserves

ÂÂ

1 to 3 quarts washed, hulled, firm-ripe strawberries

1 to 3 quarts sugar

2 to 6 tablespoons lemon juice (optional)

Strawberries for this should be without blemishes to make a perfect finished product. Use as much sugar as strawberries, and since this is a very sweet preserve it is advisable to add lemon juice. Layer the measured berries with an equal amount of sugar in a large kettle. Let stand 30 to 60 minutes so the sugar will draw a little juice from the berries. Bring to a very slow boil, stirring carefully to be sure that no undissolved sugar is on the bottom of the kettle. Simmer about 5 minutes. Remove to flat sheet cake pans or similar pans or glass baking dishes. Skim if necessary. Cover the pans with panes of glass, nylon net or mosquito netting. Place in a sunny spot during the daytime. Some people like to keep changing the pans from window to window. In former days the pans were placed on top of the woodpile! The berries should be stirred several times a day. The pans should be returned to the warmth of the kitchen when the sun goes down, for usually dew will collect on the pans, and the idea is to evaporate the liquid until a thick, rich syrup surrounds the plump berries. If there is no sun, place the pans in a very slow oven, 150 to 200 degrees, stirring occasionally until the syrup is as thick as desired. Seal, without heating, in hot sterilized jars.

 When she’s not writing about foods and gardening, Gwyn Mellinger is teaching journalism at Baker University.