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Canned Cherries
6 quarts cherries 3 pints sugar 1/2 pint water Measure the cherries after the stems have been removed; stone them or not, as desired. Put the sugar and water in the preserving kettle and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Add the cherries; bring slowly to a boil and cook ten minutes.
This is an open-kettle canning recipe: fruit is cooked in syrup and then, by the conventions of the book, ladled hot into jars and sealed with nothing further done to it. That method is no longer considered sound, and the recipe as printed omits every step that would make it safe.
- No processing step at allThe instructions end at "cook ten minutes." There is no jar preparation, no fill level, no lid treatment, and no boiling-water bath with a stated time. Nothing in the recipe brings the sealed jar to a temperature that reliably destroys mold and yeast, and nothing verifies the seal.
- Why open-kettle failsFilling hot fruit into a jar and screwing on the lid produces a vacuum as it cools, which looks like a seal but is not a sterilised one. Contamination from the jar rim, the ladle and the air is sealed in with the fruit. Spoilage in high-acid fruit is usually visible fermentation or mold rather than botulism, but the jars are unreliable and can fail months later. Use a current tested recipe with a measured boiling-water-bath time.
- Sugar ratio, for referenceThree pints of sugar to half a pint of water is a very heavy syrup, roughly 6 cups sugar to 1 cup water for 6 quarts of stemmed fruit. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century preserving leaned on sugar as a preservative in its own right; modern canned cherries are packed in far lighter syrup because the heat processing does the work.
- Which cherriesThe recipe does not say. A syrup this heavy would suit sour pie cherries better than sweet ones, which in this much sugar tend to be cloying.
- "Stone them or not"The recipe leaves pitting optional, and unpitted cherries are often said to lend a faint almond note in storage, generally attributed to the amygdalin in the pits. The quantities involved in canned fruit are small, but pitting is the modern default and makes the fruit far easier to use.
- The preserving kettleA wide, heavy pan. Modern practice favours enamelled or stainless, since bare copper or unlined iron can react with acid fruit.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Six quarts of stemmed cherries plus the syrup will fill several quart jars, but the number depends on how far the fruit cooks down.
Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to an era when putting up summer fruit was an unquestioned domestic duty rather than a hobby, and instructions like this one are terse because the general method was assumed rather than repeated. Home canning guidance changed sharply after the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state extension services began publishing standardised processing times in the 1910s and 1920s, and the open-kettle method for fruit was progressively abandoned in favour of timed boiling-water baths. The very heavy syrup here reflects an older tradition in which sugar, not heat, was trusted to keep the fruit.