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Canned Cherries
Wash. Cherries should be pitted before being canned in order to conserve space. Can sweet cherries as berries. Blanch sour cherries 1/2 minute, in boiling water. Dip in cold water; drain and pack closely into hot sterilized jars. Cover with boiling water or boiling medium syrup. Loosely seal. Sterilize 16 minutes in boiling water bath. Remove jars at once, tighten covers, invert to test the seal and cool. Label and store.
A compact set of directions written for glass-lidded jars with rubber rings, in an era when processing times were shorter than any current tested guide allows. Most of it translates directly; two instructions do not.
- Get processing times from a current guideSixteen minutes falls short of the present-day tested times for most jar sizes and packs (quarts, and raw pack generally, are processed longer), and no allowance is made here for altitude or jar size. Cherries are high-acid fruit and the water bath is the right method, but use the times published in a current tested canning guide rather than the one here.
- "Loosely seal" belongs to old jarsThe instruction assumes a zinc or glass lid with a rubber ring that can be screwed down snug and then tightened after processing. Modern two-piece lids are fingertip-tight going in and are never tightened afterward; forcing them down on a hot jar can break the seal.
- Do not invert to test the sealTurning a just-processed jar upside down was a standard 1920s check. It drags syrup across the sealing surface and can prevent the lid from setting. Let jars cool undisturbed and test by pressing the lid centre.
- Medium syrupIn books of this period a medium syrup runs roughly 1 part sugar to 2 parts water by volume, boiled until clear. Light syrup is about 1 to 3, heavy about 1 to 1.
- "Can sweet cherries as berries"A cross-reference to the berry method given elsewhere in the book, which in books of this kind generally means packing without blanching. Only the sour cherries get the half-minute scald, which shrinks them so they pack more closely, as the recipe asks.
- HeadspaceThe original says nothing about it. Leave the half-inch of headspace that current fruit recipes specify; jars filled to the brim will siphon in the bath and seal badly.
- YieldReckon on about 2 to 2 1/2 pounds of pitted cherries to fill a quart jar, so roughly 14 to 18 pounds for a canner load of seven quarts.
- PittingThe advice to pit for the sake of space is sound, but there is a flavour argument too: cherry pits left in a jar for months can lend a faint almond note, which some cooks want and others avoid.
Royal Baking Powder Company's cookbooks were promotional literature, and the appearance of a full preserving and canning section in one of them reflects how far home canning had been absorbed into ordinary household work by the late 1910s and 1920s. Food-conservation campaigns of the period promoted the boiling water bath and the "cold pack" method to home cooks, and instructions of this brisk telegraphic kind -- wash, blanch, dip, drain, pack, seal, sterilize, label -- are typical of the printed guidance then in circulation. The word sterilize is worth noting: at the time it was used loosely for any boiling-water processing, well before the distinction between high-acid and low-acid foods, and the pressure canner the latter require, was widely understood. The instruction to invert jars to test the seal, standard then and abandoned since, is a good marker of how much canning practice has been revised on the basis of later laboratory work.