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Cherry Marmalade
Remove the stones and stems from the required number of cherries; crush the stones, place them in a saucepan with a little water, and boil them until the flavor is extracted. Put the fruit in a preserving-pan with a small quantity of water and boil until it is reduced to a pulp, stirring it occasionally with a wooden spoon to prevent it from sticking to the bottom and burning. Put three-quarters of a pound of loaf sugar to every pound of fruit into the strained water in which the stones have been boiled, and boil until small, transparent bubbles appear on the top. Mix the clarified sugar with the fruit and continue stirring it over the fire until thick and smooth. Turn the marmalade into small glasses or jars, allow it to get cold, then tie them over, and put in a dry store-cupboard until required.
Two things in this procedure put it outside what a modern kitchen should attempt: the deliberate extraction of crushed cherry stones, and a sealing method that predates any understanding of preserve spoilage. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than offering substitutions.
- The crushed stonesCherry pits contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted. The recipe makes that water the base of the syrup, and it specifies no limit on the number of stones, no ratio of stones to water, and no boiling time beyond "until the flavor is extracted." There is no way to read a safe dose out of an instruction like that.
- Why old books did it anywayThe stones were valued for benzaldehyde, the almond-noyau note that sits under cherry flavor. Nineteenth-century confectioners treated stone kernels, bitter almonds and peach pits as interchangeable flavorings, and commercial extracts of that era were made from them. Modern food-grade bitter almond flavoring has the cyanogenic fraction removed; a home decoction does not.
- Sealing and storage"Tie them over" means a disc of paper or cloth secured with string, sometimes over a brandied paper round. That is a dust cover, not a seal. There is no jar sterilization, no headspace, no boiling-water process and no acidity measurement anywhere in the recipe, so nothing here establishes that the finished marmalade is shelf stable. Use a current tested preserving recipe if you want cherry preserves on a shelf.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold in a hard cone, chipped and crushed for use. It is ordinary granulated sugar for all practical purposes, and the three-quarters pound per pound of fruit ratio is lower than the pound-for-pound proportion used in many period preserves.
- Preserving-panA wide, shallow pan, usually of copper or brass, valued because the broad surface evaporated water fast. The recipe specifies a wooden spoon for the stirring.
- "Small, transparent bubbles"A pre-thermometer doneness cue for the boiling sugar. Period cooks often read syrup by the look of the boil, which is why much of this instruction is visual rather than numeric.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a nine-hundred-page compilation that ranges well past hotel service into jams, pickles and household preserving. "Marmalade" here carries its older, broader sense: the word descends through the Portuguese marmelada, a stiff quince paste, and into English it meant any fruit boiled to a thick pulp with sugar, with citrus only later monopolizing the term. The crushed-stone infusion is the period detail that dates the recipe most sharply. Cherry, apricot and peach kernels were standard flavoring stock in Victorian and Edwardian confectionery, appearing as ratafia and noyau, and cookbooks of the 1890s seem generally to have treated a handful of cracked pits as a free bonus rather than a hazard. The chemistry of cyanogenic glycosides was understood by then, but the dose in a domestic decoction was not, and preserving manuals are often said to have gone on recommending the practice for decades after.