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Pickled Cherries

Pickled cherries made with spices and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Pickled Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

Spice the vinegar

  1. Bruise all the spices.

  2. Boil the bruised spices in 4 pints of white vinegar.

Prepare the cherries

  1. Pour the warm vinegar over the cherries.

  2. Cut off half of the stalks from the cherries.

  3. Prick each cherry in three or four places.

  4. Pickle the cherries when they are ripe; they will be ready to use around Christmas.

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. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

  4. Clove + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. White pepper + vinegartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries
The main fruit, which takes up the spiced vinegar flavour as it pickles.
White vinegar
Acidic liquid that preserves the cherries and carries the spice flavour.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the pickle, balancing the sharpness of the vinegar.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the pickling liquid.
Mace
Adds a delicate, warm aroma to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Prick each cherry in three or four places. Piercing the skin lets the spiced vinegar penetrate the flesh, so the flavour reaches the centre of the fruit rather than only its surface.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mace, clove, sugar, vinegar. 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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