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Cherry Preserves
Use sour cherries. Prepare as plum preserves, but cook about five minutes less.
Strawberry Preserves, Quickly Made Dissolve two pounds (four cups) of sugar in one pint of boiling water; let boil and skim.
Add a generous quart of choice berries and let boil very gently ten minutes after boiling is established. Skim the berries to plates, return all juice drained from them to the syrup and let boil about twenty minutes, add the strawberries, let boil throughout, then store. For a richer preserve, crush the less choice berries with a pestle, then strain in a bag, pressing out the juice. Use this juice in place of water in making the syrup.
Two preserves in one entry: a one-line cherry note that leans on a plum recipe printed elsewhere in the book, and a complete strawberry method that stands on its own. Both belong to the older school of preserving, where fruit and syrup are cooked separately so the fruit stays whole.
- The hinge: fruit out, syrup downLifting the berries onto plates and boiling the drained juice hard for twenty minutes is the whole point of the method. It concentrates the syrup to setting strength without stewing the fruit to mush, which is what happens if everything simmers together for half an hour.
- Sour cherries specificallyMontmorency or another tart pie cherry. Sweet cherries have too little acid to set well and go flabby and cloying in syrup; if sweet is all you have, add the juice of a lemon per 2 lb fruit.
- MeasuresTwo pounds of sugar is about 4 1/2 cups by modern cup measure, not four, though the book's own figure works. One pint is 2 cups. A "generous quart" of strawberries is roughly 1 1/2 lb hulled.
- No added pectinThis is a preserve, not a jam or jelly, and it is meant to be loose fruit suspended in thick syrup. Judge the syrup by temperature rather than by minutes: 220F at sea level gives a soft set, and the twenty-minute boil may run longer or shorter depending on your pan.
- SkimmingThe scum that rises when the sugar syrup first boils is impurity and air. Take it off before the fruit goes in; once berries are in the pan skimming disturbs them.
- "Then store"Open-kettle filling was normal in period preserving books and is no longer considered adequate. Ladle hot into hot half-pint jars, leave 1/4 inch headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath 10 minutes; otherwise refrigerate and eat within a month.
Preserving whole fruit in heavy syrup predates jam as we know it, and the two-stage cooking here — fruit poached briefly, syrup boiled down alone, fruit returned at the end — was the mark of a careful preserver before commercial pectin appeared in American kitchens in the 1910s. Without it, set depended entirely on the fruit's own pectin and acid and on how far the sugar was boiled, which is why the recipe calls for sour cherries and "choice" berries. The final suggestion, crushing the bruised and undersized berries and straining their juice to replace the water, is thrift and flavor at once: the resulting syrup tastes of strawberry rather than of sugar.