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Dessert

Preserved Cherries

A sweet preserve made by boiling cherries in sugar water.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stone the cherries and weigh them.

  2. Dissolve the sugar in water (1 pint for every 1½ pounds of sugar).

Cook

  1. Add the cherries to the sugar solution.

  2. Boil the mixture rapidly for 30 minutes until it begins to thicken.

Jar and seal

  1. Once thickened, transfer to jars and cover with brandied paper, sealing tightly to keep air out.

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
Provide the fruit, which softens and becomes tender as it cooks in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration, helps preserve it by binding water.
Water
Dissolves the sugar to form the syrup that the cherries cook in.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture rapidly for 30 minutes until it begins to thicken. Sugar concentration rises as water evaporates, and this is what makes the cherries keep. Boiling too gently may leave the syrup too dilute to preserve well, and the fruit may not thicken properly.

“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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