Home › The Cherry › Cherries with Ice Cream
Cherries with Ice Cream
Serve vanilla ice cream with brandied, spiced, or stewed cherries as a hot or cold sauce. (Unless fresh-picked, uncooked cherries are very ripe indeed and very sweet the combination is not always a safe one.) CHERRY JELLY No. I Let cherries not fully mature stand in a crock on the back of the stove, or in slow oven till all juice is extracted, then strain, cook down one-third, and measure, allowing one pound of sugar for each pint of juice. Heat separately, then cook together twenty minutes or until it jells. CHERRY JELLY No. 2 (With Currant) Use equal parts of cherries and currants, proceeding as for No. I.
CHERRY JELLY No. 3 (With Raspberry) Use equal parts of raspberry and cherry as above (No 2). FOUR FRUIT JELLY (Old Recipe) Use equal parts cherry, strawberry, raspberry. and currant, stoning cherries and saving juice which exudes. Mix and crush, then squeeze hard; strain through linen bag and measure. Allow a pound and two ounces of loaf sugar for each pint of juice; put together in preserving kettle, boiling and skimming. It should jell after twenty minutes boiling; may take a little longer.
CHERRY JAM No. I Stone cherries and weigh, allowing equal parts of fruit and sugar. Place in preserving kettle and let stand over night, then boil till the jam jellies from the spoon. Place in jam pots.
CHERRY JAM No. 2 (With Currant Juice) To six pounds of cherries (after stoning) allow two pounds of currants. Mash and place currants with half the pits of the cherries, cracked, in a double boiler and cook thirty minutes, after this straining through linen bag. Add this liquor to the cherries (mashed) and cook to half the original quantity. Have ready a thick syrup and add six pounds of it to the fruit, stirring, skimming, and cooking till the syrup beads. Stir in either two wineglasses of Kirschwasser or Maraschino; remove, and fill jars. CHERRY JAM No. 3 Cook together three pints each of cherries and currant or raspberry juice till reduced one-half when add three pounds of sugar. Cook as for Cherry Jam No. 2.
PRESERVED CHERRIES No. I Preserve cherries with the usual pound for pound of sugar and fruit, making a syrup with either a little cold water or light wine. Grape Juice may also be used. (See Grapes.) PRESERVED CHERRIES-WITH LEMON No. 2 To each six pounds of tart fruit allow the rind of three lemons, simmering the latter thirty minutes, then straining off the water. Meantime cut fine the lemon pulp, freeing it from seeds and heavy "rag." Make a syrup of three pounds of sugar to one pint of water (using that in which the lemon peel simmered). Skim, boil and add cherries, letting boil five minutes. Add the lemon pulp and boil three minutes longer, then put fruit in jars, pouring over it the hot syrup. PRESERVED CHERRIES-WITH CURRANTS No. 3 To eight pounds of cherries, stoned, add two pounds of stemmed currants and sugar equal in weight to the fruit. After the sugar has dissolved cook together slowly thirty minutes.
A run of cherry preserves from the era of the open-kettle method, when a hot jar and a layer of paraffin were considered seal enough. Two things on this page put it out of reach: the cracked pits in Cherry Jam No. 2, and the absence of any processing step for the preserves.
- Cracked cherry pitsJam No. 2 directs that half the stones be cracked and simmered with the currants for thirty minutes, then strained into the fruit. Cherry kernels contain amygdalin, which converts to hydrogen cyanide when the crushed kernel meets water and its own enzymes. The kernels were used deliberately for their bitter-almond flavour, the same principle as noyau and ratafia, but the dose is uncontrolled and the practice has no place in a modern kitchen.
- No processing, no sealThe preserves finish by putting fruit in jars and pouring hot syrup over. Nothing here specifies a boiling-water bath, a headspace, or a processing time. Sugar concentration and the acidity of cherries do most of the preserving work, but an unprocessed jar can still admit mould and yeast. Use a current tested preserving recipe with measured processing times if you want shelf-stable jars.
- The uncooked-cherry caveatThe parenthesis at the top is garbled as printed, but appears to warn against serving ice cream with uncooked cherries unless they are fresh-picked, fully ripe and sweet. What the author meant by 'not always a safe one' -- spoilage, sourness, or digestion -- is not stated.
- Loaf sugar and the pound-to-pint ruleLoaf sugar was refined cane sold in a cone and broken up for use; it is ordinary granulated sugar. A pound of sugar to a pint of juice is roughly two cups of sugar to two cups of juice. The Four Fruit Jelly calls for a pound and two ounces per pint; no reason is given.
- Slow oven and the back of the stoveBoth instructions in Jelly No. I amount to the same thing: prolonged very low heat to sweat juice from the fruit without browning it. A 'slow oven' in sources of this period is usually reckoned at somewhere between about 250 and 325F. A range's cool end and a barely warm oven were the two places a cook then had for this.
- Linen bag, preserving kettle, wineglassThe linen bag is a jelly bag; unbleached cotton or several layers of muslin do the same job. A preserving kettle is a wide, shallow, unlined copper or heavy enamelled pan, chosen for evaporation rate rather than capacity. A wineglass in recipes of this vintage is about two fluid ounces, so two wineglasses of kirsch is roughly half a cup.
- Why the currants and raspberries keep appearingCherries are low in pectin and only moderately acid, which is why many of the variants here pair them with currants or raspberries. Red currants in particular are among the most pectin-rich fruits available to a home preserver and were the standard setting agent before commercial pectin was on grocers' shelves.
- "Till the syrup beads"An open-kettle doneness cue: the cook judged the syrup by how it fell from the spoon, watching for it to form rounded beads or drops. The recipe gives no temperature, and the cue is read by eye rather than by thermometer.
Cherry season is short — a few weeks of glut, then nothing — which is why a fruit book of this period devotes far more space to putting cherries in jars than to eating them fresh. The Four Fruit Jelly is flagged as an "Old Recipe" even in its own day, and mixed-fruit jellies of this kind were long established: cherries, strawberries and raspberries ripen close enough together to go into one kettle, while red currants supply pectin that the other three carry in smaller quantity. The kirsch and maraschino in Jam No. 2 are both cherry spirits, maraschino traditionally traced to Dalmatia and the small bitter marasca cherry, and both carry a kernel note like that of the cracked stones in the same recipe. Commercial ice cream was widely available by the turn of the century, and cookbooks of the period were busy telling readers what to put on it.