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Cherries
Stone the cherries, and if pie or Morello allow a half pound of sugar to every pound of cherries; in ox-hearts, a quarter of a pound of sugar. Proceed as for blackberries. They may also be canned with the stones in, and to my taste are very much better.
All small fruits may be canned after the same fashion.
This is a canning entry, not a dish to eat the same day, and it is written as a cross-reference: the actual method lives under the blackberry recipe. What it never gives — the part that matters — is a processing temperature or a processing time. That omission is why it cannot be followed today.
- No processing step is specifiedThe recipe stops at the sugar ratio and hands you off to another page. Open-kettle canning — boil the fruit, pour it hot into hot jars, seal, and trust the heat of the contents — was in common use in this period, and it may well be what the blackberry entry describes, though we cannot tell from this page. That practice was later abandoned because the jar contents and the sealing surface are not reliably held at temperature long enough, and the seal itself is unverified.
- Sweet cherries are not reliably high-acidSweet and sour cherries are not interchangeable in every respect -- Sour cherries (pie cherries and Morellos) are markedly more acid than sweet varieties such as the ox-hearts named here. Both are treated as acid fruit and given a boiling-water process in modern tested recipes, but the syrup strength and the recipe followed differ, and this entry gives no process at all for either.
- "All small fruits may be canned after the same fashion"A single method applied to every soft fruit ignores the wide acid range across berries, cherries and stone fruit, and ignores headspace, jar size and altitude. Modern tested recipes vary the process for each of these.
- Canning with the stones inThe author prefers stones left in, and the flavour argument is real — the pit contributes a faint almond note. Cherry kernels contain amygdalin, which converts to cyanide when the kernel is crushed or damaged. Intact pits in short-term cooking are not a practical concern; whole pits sitting in a sealed jar over months of storage are a different question, and it is not one this recipe considers.
- Period jars and closuresZinc caps with rubber rings and glass-lidded wire-bail jars were the norm when this was written. Neither gives the visible, testable seal of a modern two-piece lid, and neither is used for canning now.
- What the variety names mean"Pie cherry" is the tart Montmorency type. "Morello" is the dark-fleshed sour cherry with red juice. "Ox-heart" is an old name for the large, heart-shaped sweet cherries. The heavier sugaring goes to the sour fruit — half a pound per pound — and a quarter to the sweet.
- If you want canned cherriesUse a current tested recipe from a reliable preserving authority, which will give you jar size, headspace, syrup strength and a processed time at a stated altitude.
Home canning was the ordinary summer work of an American kitchen in the decades either side of 1900, which is part of why an entry can be this terse and lean on the blackberry instructions elsewhere in the book. The variety names are the useful part of the record: pie cherries, Morellos and ox-hearts were familiar commercial and dooryard categories of the day, sour fruit for cooking and preserving, sweet fruit for the hand and the table. The preference stated here for canning cherries unstoned rests on the kernel lending a faint bitter-almond perfume to the syrup — the same principle behind noyau and the old practice of adding a few cracked pits to cherry jam. That the entry surfaces under "Salads and Dressings" in a book called How to Cook Vegetables says more about how loosely these volumes were organised, and how freely their sections were compiled, than about where cherries belong.