Home › Fruit Desserts › Stewed Cherries
Stewed Cherries
1 pound of cooking cherries 1/4 pint water 6 ounces of sugar Make a syrup with the sugar and water, that is, just melt the sugar in the water, but do not allow it to boil or thicken; then pour it over the cherries, and bring them quickly to boiling point, and skim well. Now let them simmer slowly until they are tender. Then turn them into a bowl to cool.
A plain stewed-fruit method that depends entirely on the cherries being sour cooking varieties and on not letting them fall apart. Two measurements need translating before you start.
- The hinge: bring up fast, then barely simmerA quick rise to boiling sets the skins and lets you skim the scum that forms; after that the heat must drop to the barest tremble. Cherries held at a rolling boil split, shed their skins and turn the syrup cloudy.
- 1/4 pint of waterThis is a British book, so a quarter of an Imperial pint is 5 fl oz, or about 2/3 cup. If you measure by US pint you will be about an ounce short, which matters in a syrup this small.
- 6 ounces of sugarWeight, not volume: close to 7/8 cup of granulated (a cup of granulated sugar weighs roughly 7 ounces). That is a fairly light hand for a pound of sour cherries, and it produces a thin, tart syrup rather than a preserve.
- "Cooking cherries"Morello, Montmorency or another sour type. Sweet dessert cherries such as Bing will go flabby and sicklysweet at this sugar level; if they are all you have, cut the sugar by a third and add a squeeze of lemon.
- StonesThe original does not say whether to stone the cherries. Leaving the stones in helps the fruit hold its shape; pitting is fine and easier to eat, but expect more juice and softer fruit, so shorten the simmer.
- How long is "until tender"Five to ten minutes for pitted fruit, up to fifteen for whole unstoned cherries, tested by piercing one with a knife tip. Cherries go from firm to collapsing in a couple of minutes at the end, so check often.
- Melting, not boiling, the syrupWarm the water and sugar over low heat and stir only until the grains disappear. Boiling here concentrates the syrup and would set the sugar too high before the fruit ever gets in.
- Yield and servingA pound of cherries makes four modest portions. Cool in the bowl so the fruit reabsorbs syrup, then serve cold with cream, custard, rice pudding or a plain sponge.
Stewing was the standard domestic treatment for hard, acid orchard fruit long before refrigeration made raw dessert cherries a normal thing to eat, and sour varieties such as the Morello were commonly grown in British gardens. The technique here " syrup first, fruit second " is the same one used for bottling and preserving, minus the sealing: making the syrup separately keeps the cherries from sitting in plain water and going watery, and skimming was taken seriously because unskimmed scum leaves a dull cast.