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Dessert

Cherry Paste Drops

A sweet cherry paste made by boiling cherries with sugar, then dropped into a surface to set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cherry and peach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 177 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cherry Paste Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Combine cherry pulp, sugar, and essence of peach kernels in a preserving pan.

  2. Boil the mixture while stirring continuously until it reaches a thick paste consistency.

Shape and color

  1. If needed, add cochineal to achieve a deeper color.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the paste onto a surface as desired.

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. Cherry + peachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together177 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Sugar + peachtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

  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

Cherry pulp
Provides the fruit body and flavor that the paste is built from.
Sugar
Sweetens the paste and, as it thickens with boiling, helps it set into a firm mass.

The step that matters

Boiling to a thick paste. Stirring continuously prevents the sugar-rich pulp from scorching on the base of the pan, and the paste must be cooked long enough to thicken so the drops hold their shape instead of spreading.

Swap the cherry

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, peach. 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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