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Cherry Soup

A chilled soup made from sour cherries, water, sugar, lemon juice, and thickened with arrowroot or cornstarch, served over shaved ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cherry Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherries

  1. Remove the stones from the sour cherries.

  2. Boil the cherries in 1 quart of water until tender.

  3. Press the mixture through a sieve, discarding solids.

Thicken and finish

  1. Add ½ cup of sugar and return to heat.

  2. Mix 1 tablespoon of arrowroot or cornstarch with enough cold water to make a smooth paste, then add to the boiling mixture.

  3. Boil until clear, then remove from heat and cool.

  4. Stir in the juice of 1 lemon.

  5. Serve chilled with shaved ice.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sour cherries
Provide the main fruit flavour and tartness that define the soup.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharp flavour of the sour cherries.
Arrowroot or cornstarch
Thickens the cherry liquid into a smooth, clear, lightly viscous soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the cherry flavour.

The step that matters

Add the starch paste to the boiling liquid. Arrowroot or cornstarch must be fully dispersed in cold water first, then added to boiling liquid, so it thickens evenly instead of clumping. Boiling activates the starch's thickening, and it must boil until clear for full thickness.

“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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