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Cherry Paste
In making cherry paste the fruit is boiled nearly dry before the sugar is added, and then the weight of the pulp is taken in sugar, and boiled with it until the fruit leaves the pan entirely, and adheres to the spoon. It is then pressed into moulds, and kept like other dried fruits. It should not be covered up until it is quite dry. Probable cost of cherries, 3d. to 6d. per pound.
A Victorian fruit paste: nothing but cherries and sugar cooked down until it is stiff enough to slice. The method is sound, but the original assumes you know what the finished texture looks like and how long the drying takes.
- The hinge: cook to the pull-away stageThe paste is done when a spoon drawn across the bottom of the pan leaves a clean track that holds for a second or two, and the mass climbs the spoon rather than dropping off. The original gives no temperature, and a thermometer is of limited use in a mass this thick and this reduced; judge it by the pan test. Stop short of it and the paste never sets; go far past it and it turns hard and grainy.
- Stone the fruit firstThe text takes it for granted. Pit the cherries before the first boiling, and do not crack the stones for flavour as some period recipes suggest, since cherry kernels contain amygdalin.
- Equal weights, weighed after cookingSugar is matched to the weight of the reduced pulp, not the raw fruit. Weigh the pan empty first, then weigh it again with the dry-ish pulp in it and subtract. How much pulp you end with depends entirely on how far you take the first boiling, and the recipe wants it taken a long way.
- Cherries are low in pectinUnlike quince or apple, cherries set mainly by evaporation, which is why the recipe drives the fruit "nearly dry" before sugaring. The second boil is long and needs constant stirring near the end; a wide heavy pan and a long-handled spoon save both time and burnt fruit.
- MouldsShallow trays or tins lined with baking parchment work better than the small decorative moulds of the period. A layer 1.5-2cm deep dries evenly and cuts into squares.
- DryingOpen air in a warm dry room takes several days to a week. An oven at its lowest setting with the door ajar, or a dehydrator at about 50C (120F), does it overnight. The instruction not to cover it until quite dry is the whole preservation method: sealed damp, it moulds.
- Storage and yieldOnce leathery to the touch, dust with caster sugar, layer between parchment and keep in a tin somewhere cool and dry, where it holds for months. A kilogram of stoned cherries yields roughly 700-800g of finished paste.
- The price note"3d. to 6d. per pound" is pre-decimal British currency, three to six old pence per pound.
Stiff fruit pastes of this kind are much older than Cassell's, descending from the medieval and early modern sweetmeats known in England as quiddany, marmalade in its original sense of a solid quince conserve, and in France as cotignac and pâte de fruits. Before cheap sugar and reliable canning, boiling fruit with its own weight in sugar and drying the result was one of the few ways to carry summer fruit through the winter, and the finished slices were served at the banqueting course alongside comfits and candied peel. By the time Cassell's Dictionary was compiled in the 1870s and 1880s such pastes had slipped from the grand table to the domestic still-room.