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To dry cherries
Having stoned the desired quantity of morcllo cherries, put a pound and a quarter of fine sugar to every pound; beat and sift it over the cherries, and let them stand all night. Take them out of their sugar, and to every pound of sugar, put two spoonsful of water. Boil and skim it well, then put in the cherries; boil the sugar over them, and next morning strain them, and to every pound of syrup put half a pound more sugar; boil it till it is a little thicker, then put in the cherries and let them boil gently. The next day strain them, put them in a stove, and turn them every day till they are dry.
This is candied fruit by the old slow method: successive soaks in progressively heavier syrup, then a long dry at low heat. Nothing about it is difficult, but it runs over four or five days and the sugar ratios are the whole point.
- The hinge: the sugar must climb slowlyEach stage draws water out of the cherry and replaces it with syrup. If you shortcut it by boiling hard in heavy syrup at the start, the skins shrivel and toughen and the centres stay watery. Gentle simmers and overnight rests are what make the fruit translucent.
- Morello cherries"Morcllo" is a misprint for morello, the dark sour cooking cherry. Any tart cherry works; sweet Bings will give a cloying result because the recipe already carries 1 1/4 lb sugar per pound of fruit.
- "Two spoonsful of water"Probably a tablespoon-sized spoon, though period spoon measures are not standardised; note that it is two spoonsful per pound of sugar, not for the whole batch. Either way it is a very small amount, just enough to let the sugar melt without catching before the fruit releases its own juice.
- "Beat and sift it over"Loaf sugar came in hard cones and had to be broken up and sieved. Ordinary granulated sugar needs neither; caster sugar dissolves faster still.
- "Put them in a stove"Not a cooking stove. This means a drying closet or warm cupboard kept at a gentle heat with air moving; the original gives no temperature. A modern dehydrator on its lowest setting, or an oven at its lowest with the door propped, does the same work. Turning daily prevents the underside sticking and sugaring unevenly.
- How dry is dryFinished fruit should feel leathery and only faintly tacky, not wet and not brittle. In a dehydrator this takes hours rather than the several days a cool household stove would need.
- The leftover syrupBy the end you have a heavy cherry syrup worth keeping. Bottle and refrigerate it for drinks or puddings rather than discarding it.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- Store dusted with sugar in an airtight jar in a cool place; the sugar content is high enough to keep it for months, though refrigeration guards against surface mould in a humid kitchen.
Candying fruit in sugar was one way an English or American household with money for sugar carried a cherry crop through the winter before reliable canning, and receipts of this kind appear in domestic manuals from the seventeenth century onward. The technique is essentially confectionery: repeated steeping in syrup of rising density, a method generally traced to medieval and early modern sugar work, where candied fruits and "suckets" were luxury sweetmeats served at the end of a meal. Morellos were the cherry of choice because their acidity survives the sugar; a sweet cherry treated this way simply tastes of sugar. The instruction to put the fruit "in a stove" points to a dedicated warm drying cupboard, sometimes near the kitchen chimney, used for fruit, herbs and paste-work alike.