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Preserved Cherries
Allow one pound of sugar and one cup of water to each pound of fruit. Make a syrup of the sugar and water and when boiling briskly add the cherries, stoned, being careful to put them in without breaking. Cook until transparent.
A bare-bones full-sugar preserve of the sort every 1911 cookbook assumed you already understood. Two things need filling in: what cherry it expects, and what happens after the pan comes off the heat.
- The ratioEqual weights of sugar and fruit, plus a cup of water per pound. That is a heavy preserve by modern taste, but the sugar is what sets the syrup and keeps the jars; cutting it gives you thin, quick-spoiling fruit rather than a lighter preserve.
- Which cherriesThe recipe does not say. Sour cherries such as Montmorency or Morello were the usual preserving fruit of the period and are the likely intention. Sweet varieties such as Bing will work but tend to come out cloying at 1:1; less sugar and a squeeze of lemon help.
- Stoning without breakingThe instruction to keep the fruit whole is the hinge of the recipe. A hairpin or a proper cherry pitter pushes the stone out through the stem end and leaves the cherry intact; halving them gives you jam, not preserved cherries.
- "Cook until transparent"The cherries turn glassy and translucent when the syrup has penetrated them; that visual cue, not a clock, is the recipe's only test. How long it takes varies with the fruit.
- Keeping the fruit whole in the panAdd the cherries to briskly boiling syrup and shake or swirl the pan rather than stirring with a spoon. Work in a wide, shallow pan in small batches so the fruit is not crushed by its own weight.
- No sealing instructions are givenThe recipe stops at the stove, as period books often did, assuming the cook knew to fill hot jars and cap them. Modern practice does not accept open-kettle sealing: either refrigerate the finished preserve and use it within a few weeks, or follow current tested water-bath processing directions for cherry preserves.
Good Things to Eat (1911) is the work of Rufus Estes, born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857, who cooked for the Pullman Company's private railcars and later for the subsidiary of U.S. Steel in Chicago; his book is one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef. A canning and preserving chapter was standard equipment in a book of this date, when a household's winter fruit came from its own kettle rather than a can, and sour cherries ", the short-seasoned Montmorency and Morello types that are too sharp to eat out of hand ", were among the fruits most reliably put by. The 1:1 sugar-to-fruit rule Estes gives here is the old whole-fruit preserve formula, distinct from jam or jelly: the aim is not a spread but intact cherries suspended in syrup, glossy and translucent, to be spooned over pudding or served alongside meat.