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Cherries (Stone the cherries or not)
Stone the cherries or not, as desired, remove the stems and wash, the first thing. If the cherries are stoned, use the juice. Fill jars with cherries and juice; when the jars are heated and the fruit is soft, take one or more jars to fill the others, then pour in boiling water or syrup as desired, to fill the jars to overflow. Let cook from five to ten minutes; then tighten the covers. Allow about a cup of sugar and one fourth a cup of water to each quart of cherries.
The cherries may be cooked in the syrup and then sealed in the jars. For use in pies add no sugar.
This is a canning procedure rather than a dish, and it is the procedure that has been superseded. The notes below explain what the original is describing and where it falls short of current home-canning practice.
- Why it fails: no defined processThe recipe gives "five to ten minutes" of cooking with no statement of jar size, water level, whether the jars are submerged, or altitude. Modern hot-water-bath canning for cherries is specified as a measured time at a full boil with the jars covered by water, and none of that is fixed here. Without it there is no way to know the fruit at the centre of the jar ever reached processing temperature.
- Why it fails: sealing at the wrong point"Then tighten the covers" comes only after the jars have been heated, so the seal is finished by residual heat and steam rather than by a measured process with the jars closed throughout. The final alternative, cherries "cooked in the syrup and then sealed in the jars," is the method later called open-kettle canning: hot product sealed with no processing afterward, a practice associated with unsealed, spoiled or mouldy jars.
- Why it fails: hardwareThe instruction assumes jars of the period, glass-lidded or zinc-capped with rubber rings, whose covers were left loose during heating and tightened afterward. Modern two-piece lids are fingertip-tight during the boil and must not be retightened after, so following this sequence with current jars can buckle the seal outright. Use a present-day tested recipe and lid instructions instead.
- Acidity is not a licenceCherries are high-acid (published figures run from about 3.2 for sour cherries to roughly 4.5 for sweet), so botulism is not the main worry here. The realistic risks are heat-resistant moulds and yeasts, such as Byssochlamys, which survive brief underheating and will ferment or slime a jar in storage.
- What "as desired" was doingThe syrup given, about a cup of sugar and a quarter cup of water per quart of fruit, is there for flavour and colour, not preservation. Sugar at that level does nothing to make an underprocessed jar safe, and the pie-fruit version adds none at all.
- Stoning and juice"Stone" simply means pit. The direction to "use the juice" reflects that pitting by hand released a great deal of liquid, which was returned to the jar rather than wasted; a cherry pitter or the flat of a knife handles the same job now.
- The jar-robbing step"Take one or more jars to fill the others" is the standard period trick: fruit shrinks as it heats, so one jar is sacrificed to top up the rest. Modern recipes achieve the same by pre-heating the fruit and packing hot, with syrup made up to a stated headspace.
Domestic canning manuals multiplied in the United States in the decades either side of 1900, when the screw-top glass jar had become cheap enough for ordinary households and the summer fruit glut still had to be dealt with at home. Cherries were a natural candidate for putting up: they ripen fast, bruise easily, will not keep fresh, and tart varieties are better suited to pies and sauces than to eating out of hand, which is why the recipe bothers to note that pie fruit needs no sugar. What dates the page is not the fruit but the method. The open-kettle approach it describes was standard household practice for generations, and was steadily discredited through the twentieth century as state agricultural experiment stations and the USDA published measured boiling-water and pressure processing times. Guidance of that kind is why present-day canning recipes read as tables of jar sizes, minutes and altitude corrections rather than as prose ending in "as desired".