This might be a late response, but it will be months before pears/peaches.
Forget the cherries as you can use pieces of Santa Rosa plums. Use the
seedless purple grapes for some of the green ones and if you can get
mangos/papyra on sale, add them as well.


"Anny Middon" > wrote in message
...
> Mike and I were talking the other day about foods we used to eat all the
> time as children but haven't had in many years. One of those foods was
> canned fruit cocktail, a product both of our mothers were quite fond of.
>
> IIRC fruit cocktail was a mix of chucnks of peaches, pears and pineapple,
> along with whole green grapes and bright red maraschino cherries. I
> started thinking that maybe I should can some up this summer, except
> without the pineapple since Mike doesn't like pineapple.
>
> But then I got thinking about the cherries. When I was a kid, my sibs and
> I used to fight over who got the cherries -- there were only three or four
> in a can, but they provided 90% of the visual attractiveness of the dish.
> Once when canning cherries and peaches, I put up a couple of jars that had
> both fruits. They tasted yummy, but the cherry color leeched into the
> peaches so that both fruits ended up about the same shade.
>
> I'm thinking that back in 1960's the manufactureres were able to keep the
> color in the cherries becase the color was actually Red Dye #2 that for
> some chemical reason doesn't leech out into the sugar syrup. Since I
> certainly don't want to do that, is there some way to keep the color in
> the cherries? If not, is there some other fruit that won't leech its red
> color into the other ingredients so I'd have a yummy product that has that
> nice visual pop of the red fruit amongst the pastel ones?
>
> What if I used dried cherries? It was Bob's response to Barb's post about
> her Apricot Pineapple Cherry Jam that made me think about the Fruit
> Cocktail Cherry problem.
>
> Anny
>
>