Cherry Jam
INGREDIENTS. every lb. of fruit, weighed before stoning, which should be allowed for each pot of jam, allow 1/2 lb. of sugar to every 6 lbs. of fruit allow 1 pint of red-currant juice, and to every pint of juice 1 lb. of sugar. AVERAGE COST, 7d. per pot.
Weigh the fruit before stoning, and allow half the weight of sugar; stone the cherries, and boil them in a preserving-pan until nearly all the juice is dried up; then add the sugar, which should be crushed to powder, and the currant-juice, allowing 1 pint to every 6 lbs. of cherries (original weight), and 1 pound of sugar to every pint of juice. Boil all together until it jellies, which will be in from 20 minutes to 1/2 hour ; skim the jam well, keep it well stirred, and a few minutes before it is done, crack 'some of the stones, and add the kernels: these impart a very delicious flavour to the jam.
CHERRY SAUCE.
TIME. According to the quality of the cherries, from to 1 hour to boil them; 20 minutes to 1/2 hour with the sugar.
SEASONABLE. - Make this in July or August.
Cherry Sauce (for Sweet Puddings). (German Recipe). - INGREDIENTS for sufficient for large pudding.- lb. of cherries, 1 tablespoonful of flour, 1 oz. of butter, 1/2 pint of water, 1 wineglassful of port wine, a little grated lemon-rind, 4 pounded cloves, 2 tablespoonfuls of lemon-juice, sugar to taste. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Stone the cherries, and pound the kernels in a mortar to a smooth paste; put the butter and flour into a saucepan, stir them over the fire until of a pale brown, then add the cherries, the pounded kernels, the wine, and the water. Simmer these gently for 1/4 hour, or until the cherries are quite cooked, and rub the whole through a hair sieve; add the remaining ingredients, let the sauce boil for another 5 minutes, and serve. This is a delicious sauce to serve with boiled batter pudding, and when thus used, should be sent to table poured over the pudding.
TIME.-20 minutes to 1/2 hour.
SEASONABLE in June, July and August.
Two recipes run together here, and both of them finish by adding pounded cherry kernels. That is the reason this page carries a caution, and it is worth understanding before anything else.
- Why the kernels are the problemCherry kernels, like bitter almonds and apricot kernels, contain amygdalin, which breaks down when the kernel is crushed and wetted to release benzaldehyde, the almond-like flavour the recipe praises, together with hydrogen cyanide. Both the jam and the sauce call for crushing kernels into the pan, and the sauce pounds the kernels from the whole quantity of cherries to a paste.
- Cooking does not make it safeBoiling drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but the jam takes the kernels in only "a few minutes before it is done" and the sauce is sieved and boiled five minutes more. Neither treatment is long enough or hot enough to be relied on, and neither recipe fixes the number of kernels at all. Use a current cherry jam recipe instead.
- The ingredient list is corruptThe transcription has lost most of its fractions: "every lb. of fruit... allow 1/2 lb. of sugar" is missing words, and the sauce reads "lb. of cherries" with no quantity. The method paragraph is the only reliable statement of proportion, and even it depends on the missing figures.
- Red-currant juiceThe currant juice is not for flavour but for pectin and acid, both of which sweet cherries lack almost entirely. Beeton's ratio works out to a pint of juice per six pounds of cherries, weighed before stoning, plus a pound of sugar for each pint of that juice on top of the sugar for the fruit.
- Preserving-panA wide, shallow, unlined copper or heavy brass pan. Any wide heavy-bottomed stainless pot serves the same purpose: surface area for evaporation matters more than the metal.
- Port and the sauceA wineglassful in Beeton is roughly 2 fl oz. "Boiled batter pudding" is a steamed or boiled flour-and-egg pudding, plain enough to want a strong fruit sauce poured over it at the table.
- Cost and seasonSevenpence a pot and "Make this in July or August" place it in the short cherry season. The proportions are given per six pounds of fruit, so the recipe assumes you are working through a large quantity at once, not making a single jar.
Beeton's jam and sauce belong to the mid-Victorian preserving year, when a household bought soft fruit in bulk during its few weeks of glut and turned it into a winter's worth of pots. Cherries were a known difficulty: low in pectin and low in acid, they will not set on their own, which is why red-currant juice appears as a corrective here rather than as a flavouring, a trick that runs through nineteenth-century English preserve books. The habit of cracking the stones and adding the kernels was equally standard, and not confined to cherries; kernels from cherries, apricots and peaches were used as a cheap substitute for bitter almonds wherever a marzipan-like note was wanted, and ratafia and noyau were built on the same flavour. The toxicity of amygdalin was understood in chemical circles well before Beeton's time, but the quantities in domestic cookery were small and the practice persisted for decades. The second recipe is labelled a German recipe, reflecting the book's habit of tagging continental sauces and puddings by nation.