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Pitted Sour Cherries

A canned preserve of pitted sour cherries in a sugar syrup.

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

Pitted Sour Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

Make the juice

  1. Pit the sour cherries and save the juice and pits.

  2. Cover the pits with water in a kettle and boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture through a cotton sack to collect the juice.

  4. Combine the collected juice with the natural juice of the cherries.

Pack and process

  1. Pack 6½ pounds of pitted cherries into a No. 10 can.

  2. Cover the cherries with the juice or water.

  3. Process the can for 40 minutes at 212°F (100°C).

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).

  2. Cherry + syruptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together339 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Cherry + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sour cherries
Provide the fruit itself, with the tartness and texture that the finished cherries keep.
Sugar
Sweetens the heavy syrup, balancing the sour cherries' tartness.
Water or cherry juice
Fills the spaces around the cherries, keeping them moist during processing.

The step that matters

Process the can for 40 minutes at 212°F (100°C). Heat must penetrate the whole can to destroy spoilage microbes and keep the fruit safe on the shelf. Shortening the time or lowering the temperature risks an under-processed, unsafe can.

Swap the cherry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, syrup):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, syrup. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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