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Dessert

Pickled Cherries

A preserved cherry dish made by boiling cherries in hot vinegar and sugar, then repeated until cooled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Vinegar and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Pickled Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick over the cherries and remove any specked ones.

Pickle

  1. Place the cherries in a jar and pour enough hot vinegar and sugar to cover them.

  2. Boil the mixture and skim off any foam, then pour it hot over the cherries.

  3. Let the cherries sit for a week, then pour off the vinegar.

  4. Boil the vinegar again and pour it hot over the cherries a second time.

  5. Once the cherries are cold, seal the jar tightly.

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. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries
Provide the fruit whose firm texture and tartness carry the flavour of the pickle.
Hot vinegar
Acidity preserves the cherries and gives the pickle its sharp, tangy taste.
Sugar
Sweetness balances the sharpness of the vinegar and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Removing specked cherries before pickling. Cherries with blemishes can spoil during the long steep, and one spoiled fruit can affect the whole jar. Sorting them out first keeps the batch stable.

“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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