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Preserved Cherries
Pie cherries are best for preserving. Follow either of the recipes for strawberries. for strawberries.
This is a cross-reference rather than a full recipe: it names the fruit and sends the reader back to the strawberry entries in the same section. That leaves nothing to work from in the way of quantity, process or seal, which is why it cannot be followed today.
- No quantities, no processingThe entry gives no sugar ratio, no jar size, no processing time and no temperature of any kind. Even read together with the strawberry recipes it points to, an early twentieth-century preserving entry of this type assumes knowledge the modern reader does not have and standards no longer considered adequate.
- Open-kettle sealingMany preserving instructions of this era had the cook fill hot jars with hot fruit and seal them at once, with no boiling-water bath afterward; whether the strawberry recipes referred to here do so cannot be judged from this entry alone. Where that method is used, the seal is unreliable and the jar contents are never brought to a temperature that deals with mould and yeast on the fruit or on the jar rim. Spoilage in storage is the practical failure, and it is not always visible.
- Sugar is not a preservative hereSour cherries are high in acid, which rules out the botulism risk that attends low-acid canning, but acid and sugar alone do not make a shelf-stable jar. A tested current recipe from a canning authority, with a measured syrup and a timed water bath, is what this needs.
- What "pie cherries" meansSour or tart cherries, the Montmorency and Morello types, as opposed to sweet dessert cherries like Bing. They hold their shape and their acidity in syrup where sweet cherries turn flat and flabby. They are often easier to find frozen or canned than fresh; fresh ones appear briefly in early summer at farm markets.
- PittingThe original does not mention it either way. Cherries preserved with stones in were common and are said to give a faint almond note from the kernel, but they are awkward to eat and the fruit shrinks around the pit.
- The strawberry cross-referenceThe loose-leaf format lent itself to this kind of shorthand, with an entry leaning on the method set out nearby. If you are working from a scan of a single leaf, the recipe this one depends on may not be in front of you at all.
Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the loose-leaf era of American cookery publishing, when a binder of removable pages let a housekeeper add her own cards and clippings alongside the printed ones; the format lent itself to terse, cross-referenced entries like this one, where a whole fruit is dispatched in two lines because the method has already been set out elsewhere in the section. Canning and preserving occupied a large share of such books because the summer glut was the year's larder: sour cherries ripen in a short window in early summer and do not keep long fresh, so they went into jars or brandy within days of picking. The distinction between "pie cherries" and dessert cherries was worth stating because the sour sorts are hardier and were widely planted in northern orchards. Guidance on the boiling-water bath was circulating from agricultural extension services and jar manufacturers in this period, but many household books were slow to adopt it, and open-kettle sealing persisted in print for decades after it had been shown wanting.