Name: To Make Cherry Brandy
Ingredients: equal quantities of morello cherries; equal quantities of common black cherries; 1 gallon boiling water; brandy; 1 pound brown sugar per gallon of mixture

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 ↓

To Make Cherry Brandy

Ingredients

equal quantities of morello cherries
equal quantities of common black cherries
1 gallon boiling water
brandy
1 pound brown sugar per gallon of mixture

Directions

Steep the cherries

Fill a 10‑gallon cask with equal quantities of morello and common black cherries.
Pour 1 gallon of boiling water over the cherries and let it sit for 2–3 hours.
Fill the cask with brandy and let it stand for a week.
After a week, draw off all the liquid and add another gallon of boiling water.
Fill the cask again with brandy and let it sit for another week.

Finish and sweeten

After the second week, draw off all the liquid, remove the cherries, and pour in the brandy and water mixture.
Dissolve 1 pound of brown sugar in each gallon of your mixture to reduce the strength.

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.

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

Morello cherries: Provide the main cherry flavour and colour for the spirit.
Common black cherries: Add body and additional cherry flavour alongside the morello cherries.
Brandy: Extracts flavour and colour from the cherries and acts as the base spirit.
Brown sugar: Adds sweetness and rounds the flavour while softening the spirit's harshness.

“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.