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Wild Cherry Cordial

A homemade liqueur made by steeping wild cherries in brandy and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Brandy and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Wild Cherry Cordial

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fill a wide-mouthed bottle or jar with cherries, not quite to the top.

  2. Pour in enough brandy to cover the cherries, then measure the brandy.

  3. For every quart of brandy, add a pint of sugar and stir until dissolved.

  4. Pour the sugar-brandy mixture into the jar with the cherries and cork it.

Steep

  1. Shake well and repeat shaking at frequent intervals for several weeks.

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

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Brandy and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Small black wild cherries
Provide the main fruit flavor and color that the brandy draws out over time.
Good brandy
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavor from the cherries and preserves the mixture with alcohol.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the cherries in the finished liqueur.

The step that matters

Dissolve the sugar fully before combining. Stirring until the sugar dissolves ensures it blends evenly into the brandy, so the liqueur is uniformly sweet rather than gritty or unevenly sweetened.

“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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