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Pickled Cherries
Five pounds of cherries, stoned or not; one quart of vinegar, two pounds of sugar, one-half ounce of cinnamon, one-half ounce of cloves, one-half ounce of mace; boil the sugar and vinegar and spices together, (grind the spices and tie them in a muslin bag), and pour hot over the cherries. PICKLED PLUMS. | Mrs. Meek.
To seven pounds plums, four pounds sugar, two ounces stick cinnamon, two ounces cloves, and quart vinegar, add a little mace; put in the jar first a layer of plums, then a layer of spices alternately; scald the vinegar and sugar together, pour it over the plums; repeat three times for plums, (only once for cut apples and pears), the fourth time scald all together; put them into glass jars and they are ready for use.
Two sweet-pickle recipes of the type that filled cellar shelves in the 1870s: fruit held in spiced sugar-vinegar syrup, meant to be eaten in small quantities alongside meat. Both are workable, but the storage instructions belong to another era.
- The hinge: repeated scaldingThe plum method draws water out of the fruit in stages. The syrup is poured off, brought back to a boil and poured over the fruit again, three times over, with everything scalded together the fourth time; the syrup thins as the plums give up juice, and reboiling reconcentrates it. The recipe does not say how long to leave between repetitions. Skipping the repetitions gives you watery syrup and split fruit.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar was inconsistent, often homemade cider vinegar. Use a commercial vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity so the pickle is reliably acid; cider vinegar suits the spices better than white.
- Spices by weightHalf an ounce of ground cinnamon is roughly two tablespoons, and half an ounce of cloves about the same by volume, though cloves are lighter. Two ounces of stick cinnamon in the plums is a dozen or more sticks, depending on how thick they are. These are assertive quantities by modern taste; halving the cloves is defensible.
- MaceThe lacy outer covering of nutmeg, sold ground or as blades. Blades go in the spice bag whole. Ground nutmeg at half the quantity is the usual substitute, though it is warmer and less floral.
- Which cherriesSour cherries (Montmorency and the like) hold their shape and balance the two pounds of sugar; sweet cherries turn cloying and collapse. Stoning is worth the trouble if the pickle will be eaten from a dish rather than picked over.
- "Scald"In period usage this means heating to just short of boiling, though with a sugar-vinegar syrup you want it hot enough, and held long enough, for the sugar to dissolve completely; pour it over the fruit while it is still very hot. Hot syrup on cold fruit is the point; it firms the skins rather than cooking them through.
- Storage, which the original leaves out"Ready for use" meant a crock in a cold cellar, and the vinegar and sugar did the work. Without a tested boiling-water process these are refrigerator pickles: cool them, cap them, keep them cold, and use within a couple of months. Follow a current tested recipe if you want shelf-stable jars.
- YieldFive pounds of cherries and a quart of syrup will fill something on the order of five or six pint jars, seven pounds of plums proportionately more; packing varies, so treat these as approximate. Sweet pickles of this kind were generally eaten as a relish with roast pork, ham or cold meat, a spoonful at a time.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the mid-1870s from recipes contributed by local women and sold to raise money for a local charity — hence the attributions like "Mrs. Meek" attached to individual receipts. It is often cited as an early model for the charitable community cookbook in America. Sweet spiced fruit of this kind was a fixture of the period table: before refrigeration, the pickle jar was how a household carried the summer orchard into February, and the sharp-sweet result did the job that cranberry sauce or chutney does now, cutting through salt pork, ham and heavy roasts. Pouring hot syrup over raw fruit and repeating it is older than the book and appears in English preserving practice, where it was used for damsons and plums because it firms the fruit instead of reducing it to jam.