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Canned Cherries
Prepared in the same manner, allowing but half a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit; after putting the fruit into the syrup let it scald, (not boil hard), for ten or fifteen minutes and then can and seal. A few of the cherry stones put in a muslin bag and put into the syrup to scald with the fruit imparts a fine flavour; they should not be put in the jars with the fruit. This mothod is excellent for use with all the small fruits, as strawberries, raspberries, and also plums.
This is a fragment: it depends on a preceding entry for the method, and it describes open-kettle canning, a technique that current food-safety guidance abandoned decades ago. The notes below explain what the text assumes and where it fails.
- Why it fails: no processing stepThe fruit is scalded in syrup, then packed hot and sealed with no boiling-water bath afterward. Open-kettle canning leaves the jar rim, lid and headspace unsterilised and gives no verifiable vacuum seal; spoilage organisms, yeasts and moulds routinely survive it. Any current tested recipe for canned cherries specifies a measured time in a boiling-water canner.
- Why it fails: "scald, not boil hard"The instruction keeps the syrup below a full boil, presumably to stop the cherries collapsing. The fruit is heated, but the recipe gives no temperature, no jar size and no processing step, so there is no way to judge whether the heat delivered to the sealed jar is adequate.
- The cherry stonesThe kernel inside a cherry stone contains amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed or bruised and meets moisture and enzymes; whole, intact stones steeped briefly give up little. Stone-fruit kernels were a familiar source of an almond note in this period, and the writer sensibly says to keep them out of the jars, but this is not a flavouring to reproduce casually.
- Sugar is not the preservative hereHalf a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is a modest proportion, and the water quantity is in the missing preceding entry, so the syrup strength cannot be judged from this text. The sugar helps colour, flavour and texture but at this concentration it cannot be relied on to preserve, unlike a jam boiled to setting point.
- "Can and seal" in this periodThe jars are not specified, but glass screw-top jars with rubber rings were the usual means at the time, sealed while the contents were hot. There is no lid-flex test in the original because the modern two-piece flat lid did not yet exist, so a failed seal could go unnoticed.
- If you want canned cherriesUse a current tested recipe from a source that specifies jar size, headspace, syrup strength and processing time in a boiling-water canner, adjusted for altitude.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by local women and sold for charity, and this entry has the compressed, conversational quality of such books: it assumes you have just read the entry above it and simply tells you what to change. Home canning was still a fairly new domestic skill at the time, made practical by the spread of cheap glass jars with rubber-ring seals from the late 1850s onward, and cookbooks of the period are full of confident, unstandardised methods like this one. The cherry-stone trick draws on the old European taste for noyau, the almond-scented flavouring got from stone-fruit kernels, which appears throughout nineteenth-century cookery in ratafias, custards and preserves.