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Preserved Cherries
4 pounds sugar Wash cherries; remove stems and stones. Cover cherries with sugar, let stand two hours; then set on stove, and bring slowly to the boiling point; cook until cherries are tender. Fill jars first with cherries, then with syrup; seal.
Preserved currants and huckleberries are prepared in the same way. 4 pounds citron
This is a short preserving formula printed with its ingredient list broken apart, and it stops at "seal" — the point where modern canning practice actually begins. It cannot be followed safely as printed.
- No processing step at allThe recipe seals hot fruit and syrup into jars and stops. This is open-kettle canning, abandoned in home preserving guidance because the jar contents and the headspace are never held at a verified temperature after the lid goes on. Mold and yeast spoilage in the sealed jar is the usual result, and a failed seal is not always visible.
- No jar, lid, or headspace specifiedIn 1907 "seal" meant a glass jar with a rubber ring and a screw band or wire bail, tightened while hot. Two-piece lids do not behave the same way, and nothing here tells you how much space to leave or how to check that a vacuum formed.
- No acidity or sugar ratio you can rely onThe recipe does not say which cherries, and cherries sit close to the acid/low-acid borderline, with sweet varieties the least acidic; the syrup is further diluted by whatever juice the fruit gives up over the two-hour standing period. The recipe gives no way to know where the finished preserve lands, so the usual assumption that a heavy syrup protects itself does not hold.
- The fruit weight is missingThe ingredient list has been split by the typesetting: "4 pounds sugar" survives, but the matching weight of cherries does not appear. Period preserve formulas of this kind were normally pound for pound, but that is an inference, not what the page says.
- The stray last line belongs to another recipeThe stray last line appears to belong to another recipe -- "4 pounds citron" reads as the opening ingredient of whatever followed on the page; it has nothing to do with the cherries. Whether "citron" here means the hard-fleshed citron melon used for preserves or candied citron peel, the fragment does not tell us.
- "Cook until tender" is not a doneness testEven setting the sealing problem aside, stoned cherries soften long before a preserve syrup thickens, and the recipe gives no temperature, no sheeting test, and no time. There is nothing to judge the finished product by.
- If you want to make cherry preservesUse a current tested recipe with a stated water-bath processing time for your jar size and altitude. Do not adapt this one.
Lowney's Cook Book belongs to the era when a household is generally said to have preserved by feel: fruit and sugar in roughly equal weight, a long maceration to draw out juice so the fruit would not shrivel, a slow rise to the boil, and jars filled and screwed down while everything was still scalding. That standing-in-sugar step is genuinely good technique and survives in modern preserving, where it is often called macerating. What has not survived is the ending. Open-kettle sealing was standard in American home kitchens well into the twentieth century and was only gradually displaced as bacteriology and then extension-service testing produced measured processing times; the boiling-water bath was known in this period but appears often to have been treated as optional for sweet fruit. The casual note that currants and huckleberries "are prepared in the same way" is typical of the book's compression — one method, applied to whatever the season offered, with the cook expected to supply everything the printed page left out.