Suppress the stalks and pips from some fine, very ripe but sound cherries; range them at once in tin cans of a quart capacity and cover with a twenty-five degree cold syrup; put on the lids and solder tightly. Stand these cans in a large saucepanful of cold water, set it covered on the fire and boil the water for seven minutes, then remove at once from the fire and allow the cans to cool off in the liquid.
This is a home-canning procedure from the era of the soldered tin can, and both the container and the process are outside anything acceptable today. The notes below explain the terms and why the method fails.
Charles Ranhofer spent more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) was his attempt to set down the whole of that kitchen's practice, preserving room included. Canning at home was still a comparatively young art when he wrote: the heat-and-seal principle is generally traced to Nicolas Appert's work in France at the start of the nineteenth century, and the tin can, sealed by a tinsmith with solder, was the professional container long before the screw-band glass jar became the domestic standard. Ranhofer's instruction to solder the lids tight assumes a kitchen with the tools and the hands to do it, which tells you something about the scale of a great restaurant's larder. His neighbouring numbers in this section - brandy peaches on one side, canned pears on the other - show a house laying in summer fruit by the case for the winter menu, when out-of-season cherries meant either a tin put up in July or nothing at all.