Home › Cookery › Cherry Pickle
Cherry Pickle
Pick firm, ripe, short-stem cherries, and lay them in a stone jar, with the stems on. Put into a kettle vinegar, sweetened to your taste, allspice, mace, cloves, and cinnamon.
Put on the fire until it is scalding hot, then pour over the cherries, and let them stand until next day, when the vinegar must be poured off them into the kettle again, and scalded as before, and poured on the cherries. Repeat this for nine mornings, and your pickle is ready for use.--Mrs. C.
A nine-day cold-pack fruit pickle of the kind that assumes a cool cellar and a cook passing through the kitchen every morning. The method is sound, but the recipe leaves quantities, vinegar strength and storage entirely to the reader.
- The reason for nine scaldingsRepeated hot pours draw water out of the cherries slowly and let syrup move in without bursting the skins. A single boiling would split the fruit and leave it slack, so the tedium is the point rather than an inefficiency to be edited out.
- "Scalding hot"Conventionally taken to mean just short of a boil, steam rising and no rolling bubbles; the book gives no temperature. Hard boiling each morning tends to drive off acid and darken the spices.
- Vinegar and "sweetened to your taste"Use cider or white wine vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity; nineteenth-century household vinegar varied in strength and cannot be assumed equivalent. A workable starting ratio is 4 cups vinegar to 2 to 3 cups sugar for about 2 lb of cherries, enough liquid to cover the fruit completely.
- The cherriesThe recipe asks only for firm, ripe, short-stem fruit. Sour cherries such as Morello or Montmorency tend to hold their shape better in sweetened vinegar than very ripe sweet varieties. Leave the stems on as directed.
- SpicesWhole, not ground: a tablespoon each of allspice and cloves, two or three blades of mace, a couple of cinnamon sticks. Ground spice clouds the syrup and settles as grit on the fruit.
- The stone jarA glazed stoneware crock. Glass or a stainless pot works; avoid aluminium, copper or bare cast iron, which react with vinegar over nine days. Keep the jar covered with a cloth or lid between scaldings.
- Storage, which the original omitsThe fruit dilutes the brine as it gives up juice, and the jar is never sealed. Pack the finished pickle into clean jars, cover with the hot syrup and refrigerate; treat it as a keeping-a-few-months pickle, not a shelf-stable one. For pantry storage follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of cherries fills about two pint jars. Served then as now with cold ham, roast pork, game or sharp cheese, a few spooned out with some of the syrup.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives -- some, like this one, credited only with an initial -- is full of these sweet spiced fruit pickles: peaches, plums, damsons, watermelon rind, and cherries. The form descends from English seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pickling, where fruit in sweetened spiced vinegar stood in for fresh accompaniments unavailable through winter and cut the fat of salted and roasted meat. The repeated-scalding technique is common to the whole family of recipes and older than reliable hermetic jars; preservation rested on acid, sugar and the daily attention of the cook, which is why the instruction is counted in mornings rather than minutes. Allspice, mace, cloves and cinnamon recur constantly in period pickling receipts, bought whole and pounded at home as needed.