Skip to main content
Preserve

Sweet Pickled Cherries

A sweet pickled cherry preserve made by boiling cherries in a sugar and vinegar syrup with spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sweet Pickled Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Choose ripe cherries and lay them on a platter.

  2. Make a thick syrup by combining 2 cups of white sugar with ⅔ cup of vinegar; bring to a boil.

Steep over four mornings

  1. Place the cherries in a crock and pour the boiling syrup over them.

  2. The next morning, pour off the syrup, heat it again, and repeat this process for four mornings.

  3. On the fourth morning, bring the syrup to a boil, add the cherries, and cook for five minutes.

Finish and seal

  1. Remove the cherries to a jar and boil the syrup until moderately thick.

  2. Add the tied spices to the syrup until the flavor is extracted, then pour over the cherries and seal.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + cinnamontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked 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, which softens and absorbs the sweet-sour syrup during repeated soaking.
White sugar
Sweetens the syrup and, when boiled down, thickens it and helps preserve the fruit.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickle its sharp flavor and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Repeated boiling of the syrup. Each day the syrup must be poured off, reheated to a full boil and returned to the fruit. Repeated heating and soaking draws sugar and flavor into the cherries and keeps the syrup hot enough to help preserve them. Letting it cool or skipping a boil weakens both the flavor and the preservation.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Allspicefits about as well
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Cardamomfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon. 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.

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes