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Dessert

Preserved Cherries

Preserved cherries by boiling with sugar and water, then drying and glazing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Preserved Cherries

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherries

  1. Stone the cherries by loosening them around the stalk with a penknife and pulling out the stone.

  2. Boil the sugar and water together.

  3. Add the cherries and boil gently for about 10 minutes.

Steep and syrup

  1. Pour the mixture into a basin and let it sit for 24 hours.

  2. Drain off the syrup, boil it again, and pour it over the cherries for four more days.

  3. Boil the syrup with an additional ½ lb of sugar, add the cherries, and boil for 10 minutes.

Dry and glaze

  1. Place the cherries on a sieve to dry in the sun or a warm place, dusting with fine sugar.

  2. Alternatively, wash the cherries in warm water, place on a sieve in the stove to dry, and brush with a little syrup to glaze.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Cherries
The fruit that is preserved, softened and sweetened by the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at this concentration, helps preserve it by drawing out water.
Water
Dissolves the sugar to make the syrup that the cherries are cooked and steeped in.

The step that matters

Repeated syrup boiling and steeping. Sugar must be concentrated enough in the syrup to preserve the fruit. Draining, reboiling and returning the syrup over several days gradually raises the sugar content, so the process should not be rushed.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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