Why it works: Bread and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,638 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Cherry Sauce
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the cherries
Wash and stone the cherries.
Blanch the cherries and place them in a saucepan with enough water to cover.
Simmer gently until the flavor is extracted.
Make the sauce
In another saucepan, combine the cherries with 1 pint of water and the toasted bread.
Add sugar to taste and let it stew gently.
Strain the mixture through a sieve and serve.
If needed, boil for a few more minutes.
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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Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together8,638 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sound ripe cherries
- Provide the main fruit flavor, colour and natural sweetness-tartness of the sauce.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the cherries.
- Bread
- Toasted bread adds starch that gives the sauce a little more body.
The step that matters
Simmer gently until the flavor is extracted. Gentle heat draws flavor and colour out of the cherries slowly, while a hard boil can break the fruit down unevenly and make the sauce cloudy or harsh-tasting.
“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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