Name: Sour Cherries in Glass
Ingredients: 10 pounds sugar; 1 gallon cherry juice; sour cherries

Why it works: Sugar and cherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,598 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sour Cherries in Glass

Ingredients

10 pounds sugar
1 gallon cherry juice
sour cherries

Directions

Prepare the cherries

Pit the cherries and save all the cherry juice.
Blanch the cherries in boiling water for 10 to 12 minutes.

Make the syrup

Make a syrup using 10 pounds of sugar for every 1 gallon of cherry juice.

Fill and process

Fill jars with the blanched cherries and cover them with the syrup.
Process the jars in a boiling water bath for 35 minutes.

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.

Sugar + cherrytop 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

Sugar: Sweetens the preserves and, in the syrup, helps preserve the fruit.
Cherry juice: Forms the base of the syrup, adding moisture and tart cherry flavor.
Sour cherries: Provide the fruit, with tartness and texture as the main ingredient.

“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.