Skip to main content
Sauce

Plain Cherry Syrup

A sweet syrup made from crushed cherries, sugar, and water, boiled and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Plain Cherry Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherries

  1. Crush the cherries using a hand chopper.

  2. Add 30 pounds of sugar to the crushed cherries and stir well.

  3. Let the mixture stand for 12 to 15 hours.

Make the syrup

  1. Put the cherries into a kettle and add 2 gallons of water.

  2. Cook slowly for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Run the mixture through a strainer to separate the juice.

  4. Return the juice to the kettle and add 7 pounds of sugar.

  5. Cook the syrup until it reaches 28 degrees on the Beaume's saccharometer.

  6. Bottle the syrup while hot.

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. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries
Provide the main flavor and the juice that becomes the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps draw juice out of the crushed cherries.
Water
Dilutes the cherry mixture so it can be cooked and strained into juice.

The step that matters

Cook the syrup to 28 degrees Beaume. Sugar concentration controls the syrup's thickness and shelf life. Cooking too little leaves it thin and prone to spoilage, while overcooking makes it too thick and sticky once it cools.

“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.

More cherry syrup recipes

Morello 7 See all 24 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes