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Canned Cherries
In canning cherries use tart fruit. Allow three-fourths pound of sugar to each pound of fruit. Figs, pears, or pineapples may be canned with the cherries or added later; thus also with jam or preserves.
This is less a recipe than a note on proportions, and the missing part is the part that keeps canned fruit safe. It gives no jar preparation, no processing method and no times, and the optional additions push it further out of range.
- No processing at all is specifiedThe entry stops at the sugar ratio. There is no direction to sterilize jars, no boiling-water bath, no processing time and no headspace, so there is no way to follow it and arrive at a safely sealed jar. Current tested canning directions from a food-preservation authority should be used instead.
- Figs are the specific problemSour cherries and pineapple are acidic enough for water-bath canning, but figs sit at or above pH 4.6 and are classified as low-acid. Modern guidelines require added lemon juice or citric acid before figs may be water-bath canned; without it, an anaerobic sealed jar can support Clostridium botulinum.
- Sugar is not the preservative hereThree-quarters of a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit reads as a heavy pack, but in a jar of whole fruit and syrup the water activity stays high. That sugar level sweetens and firms the fruit; it does not make the contents shelf-stable on its own.
- Open-kettle sealingRecipes of this period often assumed hot fruit ladled into hot jars and capped, with the cooling seal doing the work, though this entry specifies no method at all. Open-kettle sealing does not heat the jar contents through or reliably vent the headspace, and it is one reason period canned fruit failed.
- "Tart fruit" means sour cherriesMorello or Montmorency types, the pie cherries, not Bing or Rainier. The instruction is sound as far as it goes: sweet cherries at this sugar ratio go cloying and lose shape.
- Jam and preserves are a different matterThe closing sentence extends the practice of combining fruits to jam or preserves rather than the canning ratio itself. A properly cooked preserve reaches a much lower water activity than fruit in syrup, so do not read the ratio given here as a preserve recipe.
Recipes of this kind are typical of the decades around 1900, when glass jars with rubber-ringed lids had become cheap enough for ordinary households and a family with a cherry tree faced a quantity of fruit ripening at once. The tart cherry was a standard preserving cherry because its acidity and firm flesh survive heat and sugar, while sweet cherries collapse; the sour-cherry orchards of Michigan and New York supplied much of this processing trade. Sugar at three-quarters the weight of the fruit reflects a period habit of packing fruit very sweet, partly for taste and partly on the common assumption, only partly correct, that sugar itself did the preserving. The casual suggestion to add figs, pears or pineapple is characteristic of the era's household writing, which treated canning as a matter of judgment and thrift rather than of measured procedure, and which did not work with pH as a dividing line between safe and unsafe fruit.