Old School Maraschino Cherries

& book tour details

Dear Recipients of the Camilla Wynne Missive:

It’s now only a matter of WEEKS before Nature’s Candy is released! Somehow the wait still feels interminable. It’s a long time between the conception, writing and release of a cookbook, and while a lot of that time is occupied by the actual *work* of writing a book, the home stretch is all planning and waiting waiting waiting. I’ve had a hard copy that I’ve been cooking out of since the spring (one of the great advantages of writing cookbooks is that you have a convenient printed record of your recipes, with much less potential of being lost than the originals scrawled down of paper scraps), and I’m just very impatient to share it with you all.

Copies will begin to ship in the coming weeks if you’ve pre-ordered (an act very much appreciated by yours truly), but if you haven’t some of the book events coming up include a copy. Some events are ticketed, so act now if you want to join! They’re all pretty much guaranteed to be tons of fun. There will be snacks! There will be conversations with some extremely rad people! There will often be drinks! And in one case there will be even be a six course meal! I really hope to see you if you live anywhere nearby. (If not, maybe at a Sunset Rubdown concert?)

Here are the details—and then we dive into a very cool recipe for what might just be the most widely known candied fruit, at least in North America. For more event info, head to my website.

Nature’s Candy Cookbook Tour!!!

NOV 6 TORONTO at Good Egg: In conversation with Chi Nguyen

NOV 9 MONTREAL at Appetite for Books: Party and Q&A

NOV 10 MONTREAL at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly: Preserve Swap!

NOV 12 BOSTON at Wild Child: In conversation with Andrew Janjigian (TICKETS)

NOV 13 NYC at Archestratus: In conversation with Natasha Pickowicz (TICKETS)

NOV 15 CHICAGO at Spinning J: Signature pastries & book signing (& Pearfat Parfum will be there sampling & selling out PERFUME collab!!)

NOV 16 THREE OAKS, MI at Granor Farm: 6 course meal/In conversation with Tim Mazurek (TICKETS)

Keep an eye on my Instagram in the coming months as well, as I have some very sweet giveaways and collabs coming up that I cannot wait to tell you more about. Ok fine, you want a hint? Think perfume, chocolate, medieval utensils, cool fruits and croissants.

OLD SCHOOL MARASCHINO CHERRIES

This spring, I managed to make it to The Great CHC Cookbook Sale organized by Culinary Historians of Canada to celebrate their 30 year anniversary, and thank goodness I did. I loaded up on books for myself, for my kid, to gift to fellow cooks. MFK Fisher box sets! Spiral-bound rural Vermont community cookbooks! An illustrated kids book on making scones! A history of Welsh food!

The best find was surprisingly the most diminutive, a slim but handsome sage green booklet emblazoned with a bright, leafy orange titled The Nellie Aldridge National Orange Show Cookbook. How could I possibly resist a $5 book with the subtitle “Many Ways to Utilize The Citrus Fruit” and boasting “all new tested receipts”?

Published in 1928, I would have bought it for the preface alone, which expresses many of the same feelings I have about preserving. Ostensibly a citrus preserving cookbook, it contains quite a wide range of baking and preserving recipes, chaotically lacking in organization (which I fortunately find charming). While the booklet contains many intriguing recipes (spider pie, anyone?) all written in the minimalist style typical of the age, I really won the lottery with the maraschino cherry recipe. It’s so rare to find a detailed recipe for a candied fruit we associate almost entirely with its commercial form. I knew I had to try it.

Here is the original recipe:

The most difficult bit was getting a hold of the sodium bisulfite, which is not readily available to your average consumer. I ended up ordering it off the Modernist Pantry website along with some pectin to make Nicola Lamb’s pineapple pate de fruits. Although it has a multitude of commercial uses, I’ve only ever seen it elsewhere in recipes for treating fruit before drying, which prevents it from browning, extends shelf life and helps keep a plump shape.

I opted to use antique jars with glass lids, as I was a little concerned about reactivity, especially considering the cherries soak in the solution for 4 weeks. The difference in their color in just 24 hours was dramatic! Funny that in this case sodium bisulfite effectively bleaches the cherries, when in other applications it helps keep the color vibrant. Presumably it’s a matter of dosage? Or the fact of a long soak in the solution? If anyone knows more about chemistry, I’d be very curious!

Day 1 vs Day 2 vs Week 4

After observing their overnight transformation, I put them in my office and all but forgot about them for 4 weeks. In that time the cherries lightened from dark red to a sort of pale apricot.

The next step is to drain, rinse and pit the cherries, which is made to sound much easier than I found it to be. Harried, as always, I didn’t have that much time to perfect my pitting. I tried with a paper clip and with a bobby pin, feeling in both cases as though I was mangling the cherries beyond repair, then finally resorted to the blunt force of my cherry pitter, which left significant holes but made short work of it. Happily I found the process of candying actually rather obscured the pitting holes. One thing I would advise, however, is to use gloves during this step. I didn’t think to, and found my skin burned mildly but uncomfortably for the rest of the day. I guess I it’s not the best plan to handle such a high concentration of sulfites barehanded!

Next the sulfurous cherries are boiled at least 4 times in fresh water to cleanse them before the candying begins. The candying itself is very gradual—the initial syrup comprising 200 g sugar to 750 g water, as well as some citric acid and food coloring to get that classic maraschino color. Now that I’m thinking about it, though, I’m a bit curious about how they’d look without color— quite ghostly, I’d bet! I used run of the mill liquid red food coloring, but it might be fun to make them fuschia (or blue or green or lavender…).

In any case, the mixture is only boiled 2 minutes before a 24 hour rest, so you’d better hope you don’t need that pot for anything else. An additional 100 g of sugar per 4 cups syrup is added daily over the following 3 days, so that (evaporated water notwithstanding) you’ve got a ratio of 500 g sugar to 750 g water. In my candying experience, you want at least a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water to get a result with some shelf life, but to be fair, I’ve never used an additional preservative like sodium bisulfite before. But just to be safe, I continued to add that same amount of sugar over the next 3 days, resulting in a nice, viscous syrup that I felt confident would keep microbes at bay— especially considering that I measured the Brix and got a happy 63.1.

Then it was time to flavor! Turns out the rabbit hole for commercial flavorings goes deep. I won’t lie to you— I was a little intimidated. I finally settled on a familiar brand, LorAnn, whose Cherry Bakery Emulsion did the trick. The result was classic maraschino cherry— only better! And with local cherries, no less.

I ended up drying more than half of the cherries (for an exciting project you’ll hear more about soon). I had wanted to keep the stems, but they simply didn’t want to stay one (see the little pile in the corner?). I simply drained them and set them on a rack set over a rimmed baking sheet for a few days at room temperature. They are giving major glacé cherry energy. Really gives me that fruitcake-making itch! (I actually don’t usually include candied cherries in my fruitcakes, but probably I always will going forth, as long as I have a stash of these.)

Confident that these cherries are very shelf-stable, I put up the rest in just 3 precious jars using the inversion method from Jam Bake. They are very precious indeed and as such will be gifted to two people who were absolutely integral to the making of Nature’s Candy. I hope that they’ll use them gleefully, primarily on sundaes and in whisky sours, though I wouldn’t object to a little pineapple upside-down cake activity.

As always, I approach the email length limit. Ha! Just enough time to say thank you for being here, do consider making your own maraschinos, please pre-order Nature’s Candy, and come to the book events—but first come to see my band, Sunset Rubdown! Our new record just came out on September 20th (listen anywhere). I know it’s confusing that I’m a cookbook author and in a reunited band, but there you have it. Life is strange. But, hopefully, also very good.

With love,

Camilla Wynne — oh! and stay tuned in about a month for a GENIUS recipe in your inbox, which is also a collab that I’m doing with my beloved Robinson Bread and will be for sale there.