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CHERRIES, TO PRESERVE (another way)
Choose sound, ripe cherries (May Dukes or Kentish cherries will be the best for the purpose), stone them, and after stoning take half their weight in sugar, and half a pint of water for each pound of sugar. Boil the sugar and water together to make a clear syrup, put in the fruit, and let it boil for eight minutes, being careful not to break the cherries when stirring. Pour all into a bowl, and leave for twenty-four hours. Strain off the fruit, and boil the syrup again with the addition of one half the original weight in sugar. Again put in the fruit, and boil for eight minutes more. When the preserve is cold turn it into jars, and cover it in the usual way.
A two-stage syrup method that keeps the cherries whole rather than cooking them down to jam. The point is the twenty-four-hour rest, not the boiling.
- The hinge: the overnight restStanding the fruit in its syrup for a day lets sugar move into the cherries instead of being forced in by long boiling. Skip it and you get collapsed fruit in thin syrup. Two short eight-minute boils are all the heat the cherries should see.
- The cherriesMay Dukes and Kentish cherries are sour or semi-sour varieties, both now scarce. Montmorency or Morello are the direct equivalents; any good sour cherry works. Sweet cherries such as Bing will preserve, but the result is cloying and the fruit softer.
- Sugar, totalled upYou add half the fruit's weight in sugar at the start, and at the second boil "one half the original weight in sugar" again. Read as half the first quantity of sugar, that gives roughly three-quarters the weight of the fruit in sugar overall: for 2 lb stoned cherries, 1 lb sugar first and 8 oz more. Read as half the fruit's weight again, it comes to a pound of sugar per pound of fruit; the wording will support either.
- Half a pint of waterThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz and half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups, per pound of sugar. An American half-pint of 8 fl oz will simply give a slightly thicker syrup, which is no disaster here.
- StoningA hand-held cherry pitter keeps the fruit intact far better than a knife. Work over the pan or a bowl and add any escaped juice to the syrup.
- What "clear syrup" meansDissolve the sugar completely over low heat before it comes to a boil, and skim the grey foam that rises once it does. Undissolved grains left on the pan side will seed crystals in the finished jar.
- This is not a set jamThere is no pectin stage and no setting point to reach. Expect whole cherries suspended in a pourable syrup, good on rice pudding or with cream, and thinner than a modern conserve.
- "Cover it in the usual way"In a late-Victorian kitchen that meant a brandy-soaked paper disc and a paper cover tied with string, kept in a cold larder. Use hot sterilised jars with proper lids and either process them in a boiling-water bath for ten minutes or keep the jars in the refrigerator and use within a month. High sugar and the acidity of sour cherries do most of the preserving work, but paper covers invite surface mould.
Cassell's offers several cherry preserves in sequence, which tells you how much fruit a late-Victorian household had to deal with at once: cherries ripen in a rush over a fortnight and will not wait. The two named varieties are both English market fruit. Kentish cherries take their name from the orchards of north Kent, whose commercial planting is traditionally traced to Richard Harris, fruiterer to Henry VIII, at Teynham in the 1530s. "May Duke" is generally explained as an English corruption of M u00e9doc, the region the variety was said to have come from, though the etymology is folk tradition rather than documented fact. Both are sour or semi-sour types, which is exactly why they were chosen here: acid fruit holds its shape and its flavour against a heavy weight of sugar, where a sweet dessert cherry turns flabby and bland.