[Sca-cooks] Preserving Bitter Cherries recipe

[jenne at fiedlerfamily.net]

How to Preserve Bitter Cherries in the most delectable and exquisite
manner so that, although the process may have been undertaken the previous
year, they yet have the appearance of being prepared the very same day.

Take about three pounds of the most beautiful and ripest bitter cherries
you can obtain (but if they are not fresh, boil them until nothing remains
after straining except the stones and skins). If you think that the stalks
are too long, shorten them.

Then take a pound and a half of sugar and disssolved it in three or four
pounds of another bitter cherry brew or juice, making sure that you add
the sugar immediately the juice has been extracted. Then put it over the
fires and dissolve it only with the said juice. Let it boil as quickly as
possible and remove any scum during the boiling. When you have done this
to the best of your ability and see that the sugar has turned red and is
thoroughly refined and purified, do not remove it from the fire but let it
go on boiling and drop the bitter cherries into it.

Stir them gently but continuously with a spatula until they are thoroughly
cooked and foaming. Still do not take them off the fire until they are
cooked right through, so that you do not have to put them on the fire
again.

When you put a drop on a pewter plate and see that it does not run, then
it is properly boiled, so pour it while still warm into small containers
holding three or four ounces. You wil then have beautiful red, whole
bitter cherries with a most delectable taste with will keep for a long
while.

I, however, have been to many and varied places in the world and have
learned and experienced that and how this one does a thing one way and
another a different way, so that I should run out of paper were I to
attempt to write everythign down. I believe, however, that France and
Italy excel in this matter, though from what I have seen they go about it
in an odd way. So I have seen it made in Toulouse, Bordeaux and Rochelle
and recently, while we are on the subject also in Genoa, Languedoc, the
whole of the Dauphine' and in the area round about Lyons.

But I have never come across more beautiful and and better ones than
theses. In Toulouse tehy boil them five or six times and several times in
Bordeaux. Eventually, though, when they are five or six months old, some
go rotten and bad and useless  and others shrivel. If you want to preserve
them properly, you must use nothing except the juice of bitter cherries,
as it increases their goodenss, size, and taste.

For if a sick person takes just a single one, he will consider it as a
balsam or other strengthening substance. After a lapse of a year they are
as good as they were on the first day.

>From _The Elixirs of Nostradamus_

-- Pani Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika   jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
"If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so that we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving. " -- Robert Frost, "The Star-Splitter"