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Spiced Cherries
To each pound of fruit, allow the same quantity of sugar, onehalf cup of water, one-fourth cup of vinegar, one teaspoon of cloves. Make a syrup of the sugar, water, vinegar and spice. Add the cherries and cook.
A ratio recipe rather than a fixed one: the proportions scale to whatever quantity of cherries you have. What it leaves out is cook time, cherry type, and what to do with the finished fruit, so those need filling in.
- The proportions, restatedPer pound of cherries: 1 lb (about 2 1/4 cups) sugar, 1/2 cup water, 1/4 cup vinegar, 1 tsp cloves. Scale up to whatever quantity of fruit you have.
- Which cherriesSour cherries (Montmorency) hold their shape and balance the equal weight of sugar; sweet cherries such as Bing give a cloying result. The recipe does not say whether to pit them. Pitting makes for easier eating; leaving the stones in helps the fruit hold together.
- VinegarCider vinegar suits the fruit best; use one of standard 5 percent acidity. Distilled white works but tastes flatter against the cloves.
- ClovesA teaspoon of whole cloves per pound is assertive; tie them in a scrap of muslin so they can be lifted out, or use half that amount if ground. Ground cloves will cloud the syrup.
- How long to cookBring the syrup to a boil, add the cherries, and simmer 15 to 25 minutes, skimming the foam, until the fruit is translucent and the syrup coats a spoon. Cooked much past that the cherries collapse into jam; the point of spiced fruit is whole cherries in a thin syrup.
- Finishing and keepingThe book gives no processing step. Ladle hot into hot jars and either refrigerate and eat within a month, or follow a current tested boiling-water canning procedure for cherries with the processing time for your jar size and altitude.
- ServingThis is a condiment, not a dessert compote. It belongs beside roast pork, ham, duck or cold cuts, in the same role as cranberry sauce or pickled peaches.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, who was born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857 and spent much of his career cooking in Pullman dining cars before working for the subsidiaries of United States Steel in Chicago; his book is one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American author. Spiced fruit of this kind — cherries, peaches, currants, crab apples, all cooked with sugar, vinegar and warm spice — was standard in American preserving chapters of the era, and grew out of the older sweet-sour tradition that also produced mincemeat and pickled melon rind. The vinegar is not there for flavour alone: acid plus a heavy sugar load was how a household made summer fruit last into winter before reliable refrigeration, and the same combination reappears in the chow-chows and mustard pickles that sat further along the same shelf.<CHAR_END/>}</invoke>caution>SANITIZED_END`</invoke_end>ationEND