Why it works: Sugar and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓
Sweet Cherry Pickles
Ingredients
Directions
Combine cherries, sugar, vinegar, and cinnamon in a pot.
Boil the mixture for 1 hour.
Seal the hot mixture in mason jars.
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.
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Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together30,779 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together20,806 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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Vinegar + cinnamontop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together5,187 recipes
Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).
Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
- Cherries
- Provide the fruit base and most of the bulk of the pickle.
- White sugar
- Adds sweetness and helps thicken the syrup as it boils down.
- Vinegar
- Adds acidity that gives the pickle its tang and helps preserve it.
- Powdered cinnamon
- Adds warm spice aroma and flavour to the sweet-sour syrup.
The step that matters
Seal the hot mixture in mason jars. Filling the jars while the mixture is still hot drives air out of them, so the lids can pull down into a seal as the contents cool.
“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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