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Cherry Preserves
Choose sour ones-the early Richmond is good-seed all very carefully, allow an amount of sugar equal to the fruit; take half the sugar, sprinkle over the fruit, let stand about an hour, pour into a preserving-kettle, boil slowly ten minutes, skim out the cherries, add rest of sugar to the syrup, boil, skim and pour over the cherries; the next day drain off the syrup, boil. skim if necessary, add the cherries, boil twenty minutes, and seal up in small jars. -Mrs.. J. M. Southard.
A two-day sugar-cure preserve, the kind meant to keep whole fruit intact rather than dissolve into jam. The method is sound; only the sealing needs updating.
- The hinge: keep the cherries wholeThe point of drawing the fruit in sugar, then boiling it briefly and lifting it out, is to firm the cherries before they ever sit long in boiling syrup. Skim them out promptly at ten minutes with a slotted spoon and let the syrup do the reducing on its own.
- Early RichmondAn old sour (pie) cherry variety, still grown but rarely sold by name. Montmorency is the standard sour cherry in North American markets and behaves the same way. Sweet cherries will not work here; the preserve turns flat and cloying without the acid.
- "An amount of sugar equal to the fruit"Read as weight for weight, the usual nineteenth-century sense, though the original does not actually say whether weight or measure is meant. After pitting: 2 lb pitted cherries to 2 lb (about 4 1/2 cups) sugar. The high sugar proportion is what preserves the fruit, so do not cut it.
- Preserving-kettleA wide, shallow, heavy pan of at least 6 to 8 quarts. Width matters more than depth for evaporation, and stainless steel or enameled cast iron is preferable to uncoated copper or brass; preserving kettles of the period were often brass or copper, though enameled and granite wares were also in use.
- Judging the finishThere is no added pectin, so the set comes from reduction alone. Twenty minutes is a guide; the syrup is ready near 220F, or when a spoonful chilled on a cold plate wrinkles when pushed.
- Sealing"Seal up in small jars" means open-kettle canning, which is no longer considered reliable even for high-sugar fruit. Fill clean hot half-pint jars, leave 1/4 inch headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes; or skip canning entirely and refrigerate for a month or freeze.
- YieldNot given. Two pounds of pitted cherries with their sugar makes roughly four half-pints.
Preserves of this sort — whole fruit suspended in heavy syrup, worked over two days — are often said to have ranked above jams and butters in the nineteenth-century sweet-preserving hierarchy, because they kept the fruit's shape and so demonstrated skill. The Dixie Cook Book follows the common practice of the era in crediting the recipe to a contributor, one of the many home cooks whose names run through community-compiled American cookbooks of the 1880s and 90s. The Early Richmond cherry named here was among the most widely planted sour cherries in the United States at the time, and is generally said to have been valued for ripening early and bearing reliably in the upper South and Midwest; its acidity is what lets a full pound of sugar per pound of fruit read as bright rather than merely sweet.