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To Preserve Cherries for Drying

This recipe preserves cherries by boiling them in clarified sugar syrup for drying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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To Preserve Cherries for Drying

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stone the cherries.

Cook in syrup

  1. Boil the clarified sugar until it snaps.

  2. Add the cherries and boil for five minutes.

  3. Let the mixture stand until the next day.

  4. Drain the cherries.

  5. When the syrup boils, add the cherries and boil for two minutes.

Dry

  1. Drain the cherries again and spread them singly on hair sieves to dry.

  2. Dry the cherries quickly, preferably in a baker's oven after the bread is removed.

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

Kentish cherries
The fruit is the dish; it absorbs the syrup and dries into a chewy, concentrated texture.
Clarified sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as a concentrated syrup, draws water out so the cherries keep.

The step that matters

Boil the clarified sugar until it snaps. Sugar must be boiled to a high concentration before the fruit goes in. A dense syrup pulls water out of the cherries and preserves them, while a weak syrup lets them spoil or stay soft.

“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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