Cherries, Dried
Cherries may be put into a slow oven and thoroughly dried before they begin to change colour; they should then be taken out of the oven, tied in bunches, and stored away in a dry place.
In the winter, they may be cooked with sugar for dessert, the same as Normandy pippins. Particular care must be taken that the oven be not too hot. Another method of drying cherries is to stone them, and to put them into a preserving-pan, with plenty of loaf sugar strewed amongst them. They should be simmered till the fruit shrivels, when they should be CHERRY. strained from the juice. The cherries should then be placed in an oven cool enough to dry without baking them. About 5 oz. of sugar would be required for 1 lb. of cherries, and the same syrup may be used again to do another quantity of fruit.
Two methods sit side by side here: plain drying of whole stemmed cherries, and a candied version simmered in sugar syrup first. Both hinge on heat low enough to dry rather than cook.
- "Slow oven" is still too hot"Slow oven" is still too hot for this purpose -- Victorian slow ovens are generally reckoned somewhere in the region of 250-300F, hot enough to bake and brown cherries long before they dry. For fruit drying you want 130-150F, so use the lowest setting your oven offers (often 170F) with the door propped open on a wooden spoon, or a dehydrator at 135F.
- The warning is the recipe"Particular care must be taken that the oven be not too hot" is the whole technique. Once the sugars caramelise the cherries darken, harden on the outside and trap moisture inside, which is exactly what spoils them in storage.
- Loaf sugarSold as a hard cone to be broken and crushed; it was simply well-refined cane sugar. Ordinary granulated is the equivalent, and the 5 oz to 1 lb of fruit ratio works out to roughly three-quarters of a cup per pound.
- Normandy pippinsWhole dried apples, a standard winter dessert item then and rarely seen now. They were stewed slowly in water with sugar, sometimes a little lemon or clove, until plump; treat the dried cherries the same way.
- Tied in bunchesThis only works with the stems left on, which is why the first method does not stone the fruit. Sour cherries such as morellos dry to a sharper, more useful result than sweet dessert varieties.
- Timing and donenessExpect 8 to 24 hours depending on size and method. A properly dried cherry is leathery and pliable with no bead of juice when squeezed; the sugared ones stay tackier.
- Yield and storageA pound of fresh cherries gives roughly 4 oz dried. Rest them loosely in a jar for a week, shaking daily, and if condensation appears on the glass they need more drying time before being sealed away.
- Reusing the syrupThe instruction to use the strained syrup for a second batch is sound, but it thins as it draws water from each lot of fruit. Boil it back down before the next round, and keep it refrigerated in between.
Drying was the oldest and cheapest way to hold a glut of stone fruit through winter, long predating reliable home bottling, and it survived in English households well into the era of the closed range because a cooling bread oven gave hours of gentle residual heat for nothing. The two methods here mark a real distinction: the plain dried bunches are a farmhouse preservation, while the second, simmered in sugar until the fruit shrivels and then finished in a cool oven, is the first stage of the confectioner's craft of candying, the same process that produced glacé cherries and crystallised fruits for the Victorian dessert table. Comparing the result to Normandy pippins tells you how these were meant to be eaten: not as a snack but reconstituted, stewed with sugar and served as a compote course, at a time when fresh fruit in January was a luxury of the glasshouse and the import trade.