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Pickled Cherries
1 pound sugar. 1 pint vinegar Remove all specked cherries. Wash and stem. Bring vinegar to the boiling point, add the sugar, stir until dissolved. The cherries may be thrown into the boiling liquid, simmered three minutes, and put into sterilized jar; but the cold-pack method is much better. Use the vinegar syrup in place of plain syrup as directed. Process five minutes.
The morello cherries are most satisfactory for pickling, and can be used in many places instead of maraschino cherries for decorating and flavoring.
This is a fragment of a larger canning chapter rather than a self-contained recipe, and it falls short of current preserving practice in two specific ways.
- The sugar is never measuredThe ingredient line gives only "1 pint vinegar," and the method then says to add "the sugar" and to use the resulting syrup "in place of plain syrup as directed." Both the sugar weight and the syrup instructions live in another entry of the book that is not on this page, so the proportions of the pickle are simply unknown.
- A five-minute process is below current guidanceModern tested recipes for pickled cherries in a boiling-water canner generally call for a longer process (commonly around ten minutes) and specify jar size, headspace and altitude adjustment. Short processing times of this kind appear in canning instructions of this era, but five minutes is no longer considered sufficient to guarantee a sealed, spoilage-free jar.
- "Cold pack" is not the modern raw packIn books of this period cold pack means filling the jars with raw fruit and hot syrup, then processing. It is closest to what is now called raw pack, but the period versions assumed jars, closures and timings that no longer match the equipment or the standards in use.
- Morello cherriesMorellos are dark-fleshed sour cherries, the same family as Montmorency but with red rather than clear juice. They are sold frozen, jarred or dried far more often than fresh; sour cherries generally are a short-season fruit and rarely appear in supermarkets.
- If you want the dishUse a current tested recipe for pickled cherries from a reputable preserving source, which will give you measured vinegar, sugar and spice, a jar size and a processing time.
- Cherry pittingThe original says only to wash and stem, so the stones are presumably left in, as is usual in fruit pickles of this kind. Pitted fruit is likely to hold its shape less well, so expect a different result if you stone them.
Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the loose-leaf era of American cookery publishing, when a housekeeper bought a binder and added or removed pages. Its canning chapter sits in the period of heavy promotion of home preserving around the First World War and the extension work that followed. The remark that pickled morellos can replace maraschino cherries "for decorating and flavoring" is a period tell: true maraschinos were sour Marasca cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur from the Dalmatian coast, but by the early twentieth century the American market was dominated by imitations, and under Prohibition the domestic product was made without the liqueur. A vinegar-pickled sour cherry was a plausible home answer to that gap, sharp enough to cut sweet frostings and puddings and cheap if you had a tree. The reliance on cross-references to a "plain syrup as directed" elsewhere in the binder is also characteristic of the format, and it is why this particular page reads as incomplete today.