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Stewed Cherries
Select pie cherries, preferably the morello cherries; stone them or not as desired and follow the directions for Stewed Blackberries.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: the whole method lives under Stewed Blackberries, and what is offered here is the substitution and the choice of fruit. A few notes on what that leaves unsaid.
- What "pie cherries" meansPie cherries are sour cherries — Montmorency is the common market variety now. Morello is the darker-fleshed, darker-juiced sour type, and its juice holds its colour better in a stew than Montmorency's does. Sweet cherries (Bing, Rainier) are the wrong fruit here; they turn flat and cloying once sugared.
- The missing quantitiesWithout the blackberry entry in front of you there is no sugar ratio, no water, no time. Period recipes for stewed sour fruit vary widely in sweetening, so any figure you work from is your own guess rather than this book's instruction.
- Stoned or notLeaving the pits in gives a faint almond note and keeps the fruit intact; the book simply leaves the choice to the cook. It also means warning anyone at the table. A hand cherry pitter does a quart in a few minutes; the pitted fruit will slump more and cook faster.
- Heat and timingSour cherries collapse quickly. Bring them to a bare simmer and hold it — five to eight minutes is usually enough for pitted fruit to soften and throw its juice. A rolling boil shreds the skins and drives off the fresh flavour.
- Sugar goes in lateAdd sugar once the fruit has released liquid, not at the start. Sugar added to dry fruit draws water out of the cells and firms the skins, so the cherries stay tough while the syrup thins.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities, so yield is up to you; as a rough guide, two pounds of stemmed, pitted cherries reduces to something near a quart of stewed fruit.
Sour cherries were a fixture of the American kitchen garden long before they were a market crop: the trees are hardy, self-fertile and productive, and the fruit is too tart to eat out of hand, so most of it went to stewing, canning, pies and preserves in a short summer rush. The morello group the recipe prefers is the older European sour cherry type, distinguished from the paler amarelles by red rather than clear juice. The recipe's terse cross-reference follows from that economy of method — one master method for stewed fruit, then a page apiece pointing back to it for each fruit in season.