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Peach and Cherry Preserves
Use the recipe for "preserved peaches" Cook large, sour, red cherries (do not stone them) in the thin syrup after the peaches are cooked, let drain, and reheat with the peaches in the reduced syrup. Store in the same jars as the peaches.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's "preserved peaches" in front of you and are simply adding cherries to the same pot and the same jars. A few things need filling in.
- It depends on another recipeAll the quantities — fruit, sugar, water, cooking times — live in the peach preserve recipe. Read that first; nothing here works without it.
- Thin syrup vs. reduced syrupPeach preserves of this era are made in two stages: fruit is poached in a light syrup, then the syrup is boiled down and the fruit returned to it. The cherries go into the leftover thin syrup, then rejoin the peaches only at the final reheat in the thickened syrup.
- "Large, sour, red cherries"Montmorency or Morello — tart pie cherries, not Bing or Rainier. Sweet cherries turn flabby and cloying in a peach syrup already carrying a lot of sugar.
- Cherries cook fastSour cherries collapse quickly. Poach them just until the skins darken and they lose their raw firmness — the original gives no time, but a few minutes is usually enough — then drain. The second heating in the reduced syrup is a warming, not a cooking.
- Unstoned cherriesLeaving the pits in keeps the fruit whole and lends a faint almond note over months of storage. It also means anyone eating the preserve is biting around stones — worth saying at the table, and worth avoiding entirely if children are eating.
- Sealing is not covered here"Store in the same jars as the peaches" reflects a period assumption that a hot pack under a sealed lid keeps indefinitely. For preserves you intend to hold at room temperature, use current boiling-water-bath processing times for the jar size; otherwise treat the jars as refrigerator preserves and use them within a few weeks.
Household canning books of the early twentieth century contain a number of these "and" preserves — peach and cherry, pear and ginger, quince and apple — the point being to use one syrup, one kettle and one afternoon's fire for whatever the orchard sent in at once. Cherries were sometimes left unstoned to save labor, and cooks valued the faint bitter-almond flavor the kernels give a syrup over time, an effect usually credited to the same compounds that make cherry and almond taste related. The two-syrup method — poach thin, reduce, return the fruit — was a common way to keep fruit whole instead of shredding it, and it long predates reliable thermometers and pectin tests.