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Pickled Cherries
5 Pounds Cherries 1 Quart of Vinegar 2 Pounds of Sugar 1/2 Ounce each of Mace and Cinnamon Stone cherries; grind spices and tie in muslin bag; boil spices, sugar and vinegar together and pour hot over cherries.
A sweet-sour spiced fruit pickle of the kind that was kept on the pantry shelf to serve with cold meat. The method is brief to the point of terseness, and a few things need filling in.
- The hinge: one hot pour is not enoughThe hinge: one hot pour may not be enough -- A single dose of hot syrup over 5 lb of raw fruit cools fast and can leave the cherries floating in thin, watery liquid. Many spiced-fruit receipts direct that the syrup be drained off, reboiled and poured back over the fruit on each of three successive days, which concentrates the syrup and draws the fruit down without cooking it to mush. The recipe as printed calls for one pour only.
- Which cherriesSour cherries (Montmorency, morello) are what this is built for; the 2 lb of sugar reads as cloying with sweet Bings. Five pounds unpitted yields roughly 4 1/2 lb of stoned fruit.
- "Stone" the cherriesPit them, keeping them whole. Leave the stems off. Work over a bowl so the juice goes into the pickle rather than the sink.
- Vinegar strengthUse a standard 5% acidity cider or white wine vinegar. Household vinegar of the period varied widely in strength, so the original quantity is a starting point rather than a guarantee of acidity.
- Mace and cinnamonHalf an ounce each is about 2 tablespoons of ground spice apiece. Using whole blade mace and broken cinnamon sticks in the muslin bag instead of grinding keeps the syrup clear rather than muddy, though the recipe as printed says to grind them. Remove the bag before the final pour.
- Boiling the syrupBring vinegar, sugar and spice bag to a boil and give it a few minutes to dissolve the sugar and take up the spice, then pour it over the fruit while genuinely hot.
- StorageThis is a refrigerator pickle by modern standards. Pack into clean jars, cover, and keep cold; it will be ready in about a week and holds a couple of months. For shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested water-bath canning recipe rather than this one, which gives no processing time or seal instructions.
- Yield and servingRoughly 8 pints. Serve cold in small quantity with ham, roast pork, cold beef or a sharp cheese; a few spoonfuls with their syrup are the whole point.
Spiced and pickled fruit sat squarely in the sweet-sour tradition that English and German cooking carried into American kitchens, where a jar of pickled cherries, peaches or crabapples was a common foil to a platter of cold meat before commercial chutneys and relishes were on grocery shelves. Mace and cinnamon are a familiar pairing in earlier receipts for spiced fruit, and the muslin spice bag was a well-established way to get the flavour without the grit. Compilations of this sort were often sold or given as wedding presents, and a Pickles section was a usual feature of them.