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Preserved Cherries
Jennie June.
Stone the fruit, weigh it, and for every pound take three-quarters of a pound of sugar. First dissolve the sugar in water in the proportion of a pint of water to a pound and a-half of sugar; then add the fruit and let it boil as fast as possible for half an hour, till it begins to jelly. As soon as it thickens put in pots, cover with brandied paper, next the fruit, and then cover closely from the air.
A plain sugar-syrup preserve of the type that filled nineteenth-century store cupboards, written for a cook who already knew what a setting point looked like. Two things decide whether it works: the kind of cherry and how you judge the set.
- Use sour cherriesMorellos or Montmorency bring the acid, and a little more pectin, that helps this method along. Cherries are not a high-pectin fruit in any case, and sweet ones are likelier to stay a loose syrup; if that is all you have, add the juice of a lemon per 2 lb of fruit.
- The syrup proportionA pint of water to a pound and a half of sugar is roughly 2 cups water to about 3 1/2 cups sugar. The fruit itself is dressed at three-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of stoned cherries, so weigh after pitting, not before.
- "Boil as fast as possible"This means a full rolling boil in a wide pan, not a simmer. The half hour is an estimate, not an instruction; a wide preserving pan may set in 15 to 20 minutes, and cherries held at a hard boil much past setting point turn leathery and taste caramelised.
- Judge the set, not the clockSetting point is 220F on a thermometer, or a spoonful that wrinkles when pushed with a fingertip on a chilled saucer. "Begins to jelly" is what the original is asking you to watch for.
- PittingTo stone means to pit. A cherry pitter is fastest; the older kitchen trick of pushing the stone out with a bent hairpin works but bruises the fruit and costs you juice.
- Pots and brandied paper"Pots" are glass or stoneware jars. Brandied paper is a round of paper cut to fit and dipped in spirits, laid directly on the hot surface of the preserve to discourage mould, then the jar covered over. It is a mould barrier, not a seal.
- Storing it nowPaper and a cloth cover will not keep a preserve safely at room temperature for months. Fill clean hot jars, cool, and keep them in the refrigerator for a few weeks, or freeze; for shelf storage, follow a current tested water-bath canning process for cherry preserves.
- YieldNot given. Two pounds of pitted cherries with the syrup makes roughly four to five half-pint jars, depending on how far it is boiled down.
"Jennie June" was the pen name of Jane Cunningham Croly (1829-1901), one of the first American women to make a full career of newspaper journalism and the founder of the women's club Sorosis; her household columns were widely known, and a compiled charity cookbook like The Home Cook Book could print her name alone as authority for a recipe. The method here is the older, pre-jar-lid way of keeping fruit: a high proportion of sugar boiled hard to drive off water, then a spirit-soaked paper laid on the surface, because alcohol suppresses the surface moulds that were the real enemy before airtight sealing became ordinary. Brandy or rum paper appears in English and American preserving instructions through most of the nineteenth century and fades out gradually thereafter, a decline usually associated, among other causes, with the spread of the screw-band jar and its cheap, reliable vacuum seal in the domestic kitchen.