After blueberry pie, cherry pie is my second favorite fruit pie. My grandmother made the absolute best cherry pie with fresh sour cherries from her tree with a lard-based crust, of course. I don’t have a cherry tree in my yard, and this summer I wasn’t able to even find frozen sour cherries at the grocery store, but they did have a pretty good sale on dark sweet cherries, so I thought I’d give them a try and see what kind of pie filling they would make. I again turned to my well-used The All New Book of Canning and Preserving from Ball. There I found a chart showing basic pie filling instructions for various fruits, and sweet cherry filling was one of them.

The ingredients are given per quart, which is nice because sometimes you don’t know how many quarts you’re going to end up with, so this helps you manage your ingredients a little bit better. I ended up with enough cherries for 2 quarts, but I put them in pints because if I decide to make hand pies, I won’t necessarily need an entire quart of filling.

Sweet Cherry Pie Filling

For each quart jar:

6 cups dark sweet cherries, washed, stemmed, and pitted

1/2 cup sugar

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon almond extract (I’m not an almond extract fan, so I substituted real vanilla extract)

Prepare canner, jars, and lids.

Bring prepared fruit and sugar to a boil in a large saucepan. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, for 5 minutes, stirring often. Remove from heat and stir in lemon juice, cinnamon, and extract.

Process jars for 30 minutes, adjusting for altitude. Remove canner lid. Let jars stand for 5 minutes, then remove, cool, and store.

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