Name: To Make Cherry Brandy
Ingredients: 1 lb Morella cherries; 3 oz pounded sugar; good brandy

Why it works: Sugar and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

To Make Cherry Brandy

Ingredients

1 lb Morella cherries
3 oz pounded sugar
good brandy

Directions

Prepare

Ensure glass bottles are perfectly dry.
Select cherries that are not too ripe and freshly gathered.
Cut off about half of the stalks.

Fill the bottles

Place cherries in the bottles.
Add sugar between layers.
When bottles are nearly full, pour in enough brandy to reach just below the cork.

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 + brandytop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

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

Morella cherries: Provide the fruit flavour and juice that the brandy steeps into.
Pounded sugar: Sweetens the brandy and draws out juice from the cherries as it dissolves.
Good brandy: Acts as the alcohol base that extracts flavour from the cherries and preserves them.

“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.