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Morello Cherries

Preserved cherries soaked in sugar syrup and wrapped in brandy paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and brandy work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 105 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Morello Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherries

  1. Pick sound, ripe cherries from the stalks and wipe them separately.

  2. Prick each cherry four to five times with a small needle.

  3. Strew half of the sugar over the cherries on a clean, dry dish and let them sit for 18 hours.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil red currant juice with the remaining sugar for 10 minutes, skimming well.

  2. Add the cherries with their sugar to the syrup and simmer for 5 minutes without boiling.

  3. Remove the cherries and place them in glasses.

  4. Boil the syrup until thick and pour it cool over the cherries.

Seal and store

  1. Cover with brandy paper and seal with paper over the glasses.

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. Red currant + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + red curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Sugar and brandy 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 fruit that is preserved, with tartness that balances the sugar.
Loaf sugar
Draws moisture out of the fruit and preserves it, sweetening the dish.
Red currant juice
Supplies liquid and natural pectin to dissolve the sugar into a syrup.

The step that matters

Simmer the cherries without boiling. Boiling the cherries hard breaks their skins and toughens the flesh, so they lose shape. Gentle simmering keeps them whole while the syrup thickens around them.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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