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Candied Cherries
This formula was donated by one in charge of a soda fountain. The cherries cannot be told from the maraschino cherry. The Mt.
Morenci, or any firm cherry, is best adapted for this purpose; stone carefully the amount of cherries desired; soak the cherries in vinegar twenty-four hours; this makes them firm; then drain. Take equal weights of granulated sugar and cherries; thoroughly mix, then lay the mixture on platters and keep in a cool place for seven days; stir well each day; put in jars and seal. Keep in the cellar while curing.
Grapes Preserved by Sealing Wax Select choice bunches of ripe grapes, fresh from the vine. Heat the end of a stick of sealing wax in the flame of a candle or lamp, and with the hot wax completely cover the ends of the stems, thus excluding air and retaining juice. Pack the grapes in a wooden box with a layer of cotton batting between the layers.
Store in a cool place.
Glacé Figs Put figs in pan. Make syrup to cover in proportion of one cup and a half of sugar to one cup of water. Cook until figs are a little yellow and keep in syrup over night. Next day cook in same syrup half an hour, leave again over night, then cook until stem is transparent, and leave until cold. Then drain on plate, spread on mosquito netting stretched over pan or tray, and dry thoroughly. Wet the netting before putting the fruit on it.
Three preserving tricks are run together on this page; the cherry formula is the titled one, and it is the one that cannot be recommended. It is a raw sugar cure that ends with sealed jars and no heat at any stage.
- Nothing is ever heatedThe cherries are soaked in vinegar, mixed with sugar, held on open platters at room-to-cellar temperature for a week, then sealed. There is no boil, no hot pack and no processing of the filled jars, so the fruit goes into an anaerobic sealed container carrying whatever yeasts and molds came in on the skins and off the platters.
- The sugar concentration is not controlledEqual weights of sugar and fruit sounds like a preserving syrup, but cherries are mostly water. As they weep over seven days the syrup that forms is likely to fall below the sugar level that reliably suppresses microbial growth, and the recipe gives no way to measure or correct it. Fermentation or surface mould in a sealed, unprocessed jar is the expected result, and the preserve is then spoiled.
- Vinegar is used for texture, not acidityThe 24-hour soak is there to firm the flesh, as the recipe itself says, and the cherries are drained afterward, so most of the acid is poured off rather than carried into the jar. Do not read the vinegar as a safeguard.
- "Keep in the cellar while curing"A cellar of the period was generally cooler than a modern basement or pantry, though it varied with the house and the season, and the instruction gives no temperature at all. If you want candied or maraschino-style cherries, use a current tested recipe with stated syrup strengths and processing times.
- Mt. Morenci cherriesAlmost certainly Montmorency, the standard American sour cherry, still widely grown and sold frozen or canned. The recipe's real requirement is simply a firm-fleshed cherry that holds its shape in syrup.
- The grapes are storage, not preservingSealing the cut stem ends with wax slows moisture loss and keeps a bunch plump for some weeks; it kills nothing. Period sealing wax was a shellac-and-resin blend with mineral colorants of unknown composition, which is reason enough to keep it away from food today.
- The figs are the sound entryRepeated short cooks in a heavy syrup, 1 1/2 cups sugar to 1 cup water, with overnight rests between, is the standard candying method and still works. "Mosquito netting" is any open-weave cloth or a rack; wetting it stops the fruit gluing itself down.
The donor being "one in charge of a soda fountain" is the whole point of this formula. True maraschino cherries were Marasca cherries from the Dalmatian coast steeped in maraschino, the bitter-almond-scented cherry liqueur, and they reached American ice cream parlors as an expensive import. Domestic imitations followed almost immediately, and the soda fountain trade put them on sundaes and in punches. Commercial versions were being brined and bleached with sulfur dioxide before being sweetened and dyed, a process American producers refined in the early twentieth century, and Prohibition later did away with the liqueur-steeped type. A housewife's version had to reach the same effect with vinegar for firmness and a slow sugar cure for sweetness, and the claim that the result "cannot be told from the maraschino cherry" is the sort of promise that got a recipe copied into a community cookbook.