Home › Preserves, Marmalades, Jams, Conserves and Fruit Butters › Cherry Preserves
Cherry Preserves
2 pounds sour cherries, weighed after stoning 1 1/2 pounds sugar Add the sugar to the stoned cherries and bring them quickly to the boiling-point. Cook rapidly until the fruit is clear, skimming as necessary. Pour at once into clean hot jars and seal.
A two-ingredient preserve that depends entirely on the fruit being genuinely sour. The proportion here is unusually low in sugar for its era, which gives a bright, tart preserve with a loose set.
- Weigh after pittingTwo pounds of stoned cherries means roughly 2 1/4 to 2 1/3 pounds as purchased, since pits and stems account for about 10-15 percent of the weight. Pit into the bowl you weigh in so none of the juice is lost.
- Sour cherries onlyMontmorency and Morello types are what is meant; sweet cherries such as Bing lack the acid to set or to balance the sugar, and will give a cloying syrup. Frozen sour cherries, thawed and drained of nothing, work well and are often the only option outside a short summer season.
- The hinge: cook fast, not long"Bring quickly to the boiling-point" and "cook rapidly" are both deliberate. A hard, wide boil in a shallow pan drives off water in minutes and keeps the fruit red; a slow simmer in a deep pot turns the cherries brown and flabby.
- Knowing when it is done"Until the fruit is clear" is a real visual cue -- the cherries stop looking opaque and the syrup thickens around them. A thermometer is of limited help here: with only 3/4 pound of sugar per pound of fruit and no added pectin the preserve is generally taken off well short of the 220F jelly point, and the result stays deliberately soft, closer to a fruit in syrup than a stiff jam.
- SkimmingSkim the pink foam off with a metal spoon as it rises; it is mostly trapped air rather than anything spoiled, and left in it clouds the jars. A very small knob of butter added at the start reduces it, at the cost of a slightly shorter shelf life.
- SealingPouring hot preserve into hot jars and sealing -- open-kettle canning -- was standard in the 1920s but is no longer considered sufficient for shelf storage. Current practice is to fill hot jars to a quarter-inch headspace and process them in a boiling water bath, or simply to refrigerate the filled jars and use them within a few weeks.
- YieldAbout four to five half-pint jars, a little more if the cherries were very juicy.
Sour cherry preserves belong to the brief, urgent category of summer put-ups: pie cherries ripen over a week or two, bruise quickly, and cannot be held, so households processed them the day they came in. The New Delineator Recipes came out of the Butterick magazine kitchens in 1929, when home canning was still routine in American households but was being rewritten in the language of tested proportions rather than the older "pound for pound" rule of thumb. The reduced sugar here -- three quarters of a pound per pound of fruit instead of the traditional equal weights -- reflects that shift toward shorter, brighter cooking and away from the very heavy syrups of nineteenth-century preserving, which relied on sugar saturation alone to keep the jar. It is also the reason the modern reader should treat the sealing instruction, rather than the fruit, as the part that has dated.