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Cherry Preserves
2 pounds sour cherries, weighed 1½ pounds sugar after stoning
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 three-line preserve of the old proportional school: fruit, sugar, heat, jar. The only real difficulties are a garbled sugar quantity and a sealing method that has since been superseded.
- The sugar quantityThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for 1½ pounds of sugar to 2 pounds of stoned sour cherries, as our text now gives. That is the three-quarters weight of sugar to fruit typical of preserves of the period.
- Weighed after stoningThe instruction matters. Pits and stems account for something on the order of 5 to 10 percent of the weight of sour cherries, so you need a little over 2 pounds of whole fruit to yield 2 pounds stoned. Weigh after pitting, not before.
- Sour cherries specificallyMontmorency or Morello types, not sweet Bing or Rainier. Sour cherries carry markedly more acid; sweet cherries make a slack, cloying preserve on the same formula.
- Why "quickly" and "rapidly"This is the hinge. A hard, open boil drives off water fast and sets the fruit while it still tastes like cherries; a long slow simmer dulls the colour to brown and the flavour to stewed. Use a wide pan so evaporation is quick.
- Judging "until the fruit is clear"The cherries turn translucent and the syrup thickens; for a set, jelly-makers look for about 220F (104C) at sea level, roughly 8 degrees above boiling. The recipe gives no time, and it will vary with the width of the pan.
- SkimmingThe foam is trapped air and protein, not spoilage. Skim it if you want a clear jar; a small knob of butter added at the start suppresses most of it, though it slightly shortens keeping.
- Sealing has moved on"Pour at once into clean hot jars and seal" is the open-kettle method, and it relies on the hot preserve sterilising the jar. Current practice is a boiling-water bath — about 10 minutes for half-pints on a rack, adjusted for altitude — because open-kettle jars mould at the surface with some regularity. Paraffin wax caps, common in the period, are no longer recommended at all.
- YieldAbout four half-pint jars. Anything that fails to seal goes in the refrigerator and should be eaten within a month.
The Butterick book belongs to the high-water mark of American domestic preserving, when a household with a sour cherry tree in the yard faced a short glut every summer and no freezer to absorb it. "Preserve" here has its exact older sense — whole fruit suspended in heavy syrup, distinct from the jam that is crushed and the marmalade that is sliced. Sour cherries were the pie and preserve cherry of the period, grown across the Great Lakes states and in dooryards everywhere, and their acidity is the reason recipes like this one need no commercial pectin: commercial pectin only reached American kitchens from the 1910s, with powdered forms later still, and books of this vintage assume a cook who sets fruit by boiling it hard and watching the spoon.