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Cherry Conserve
3½ pounds cherries 2½ pounds sugar 1/4 pound seeded raisins 3 oranges Select large red cherries; stone them and cook for fifteen minutes. Heat the sugar in the oven; add it to the cherries; also the raisins and the juice and pulp of the oranges. Cook until the mixture is as thick as marmalade. Turn into sterilized glasses and seal. 1 pineapple
A straightforward high-sugar conserve, but the original assumes a cook who knows when marmalade is done and who sealed jars with paraffin. A few points bring it up to date.
- The stray pineappleThe line "1 pineapple" at the end is an orphan — either the first ingredient of the next recipe on the leaf or a fragment of an alternative version. Nothing in the method uses it, so ignore it.
- Weigh before stoningThe recipe does not say whether the 3½ lb is weighed before or after stoning. If before, allow roughly a tenth of the weight for the pits, which leaves a little over 3 lb of fruit against 2½ lb of sugar.
- Which cherries"Large red cherries" could mean either a sweet red cherry or a firm sour one such as Montmorency; the recipe does not say. With sweet cherries the conserve will be very sweet, and a little lemon juice helps keep it in balance.
- Heating the sugarThe recipe says only to heat the sugar in the oven; no temperature is given. Warming it spread on a tray in a low oven so that adding it does not stall the boil is a genuine help with a large batch.
- Seeded raisinsMeans raisins with the seeds removed, not a modern seedless variety by name — but ordinary seedless raisins are exactly what is wanted. Chop them coarsely so they distribute.
- The oranges"Juice and pulp" is the flesh, not the peel; discard pips and the bitter white pith. The finely shredded zest of one orange, if you want it, will give a more marmalade-like character.
- Knowing when it is done"As thick as marmalade" means setting point: 220F on a thermometer at sea level, or a spoonful that wrinkles on a chilled plate. Expect 25-40 minutes of open boiling after the sugar goes in, stirring often as it thickens and catches easily.
- Sealing"Sterilized glasses and seal" in this period usually meant hot jars closed with paraffin wax, which is no longer recommended. Use two-piece canning lids and process the filled half-pint jars 10 minutes in a boiling water bath, adjusting for altitude.
- YieldNo yield is given. From roughly six pounds of fruit and sugar, expect on the order of eight or nine half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it.
A conserve, in the vocabulary of American preserving books of this period, is not quite a jam: it is fruit cooked down with sugar plus additions — raisins, citrus, often nuts — so that it eats as a relish or a spread for tea bread rather than a plain fruit butter. Oranges and raisins were a common pair, stretching a short and expensive fruit like the sour cherry, whose season lasts a couple of weeks in early summer. Mrs. Fryer's book, attributed to Jane Eayre Fryer, was issued in the loose-leaf binder format so that a housekeeper could add, remove and reorder pages. The instruction to heat the sugar in the oven belongs to range cookery, when a large cold addition to a preserving pan could cost time in recovering the boil.