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Drink

Cherry Bounce

A homemade cherry liqueur made by macerating cherries in spirits, sweetened with a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Spirit and cherry brandy work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9 recipes. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Cherry Bounce

Ingredients

Directions

Steep the cherries

  1. Fill a wide-mouthed demijohn nearly full with wild cherries.

  2. Pour in enough white spirits to fill the demijohn completely.

  3. Cork the demijohn and set aside for 3 to 4 months until it becomes dark.

  4. If too dark, add more spirits and strain off the fruit.

  5. Add ½ cup of cold water.

Make the syrup and bottle

  1. Make a syrup by boiling 3 pounds of sugar in 1 quart of water.

  2. Add 1½ gallons of this syrup to 4 gallons of the cherry brandy.

  3. Fill bottles through a funnel lined with a piece of flannel.

  4. Cork the bottles well and set them aside.

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. Spirit + cherry brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  2. Spirit + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + cherry brandytop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Wild cherries
Provide the fruit flavour and colour that the spirit extracts over months.
Best white spirits
Extract flavour and colour from the cherries and preserve the fruit.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body to the finished liqueur once dissolved in syrup.

The step that matters

Stop the darkening in time. Cherries keep releasing colour and tannin into the spirit while they steep, so the colour can get too dark. Checking the colour and straining off the fruit in time keeps the flavour clean and the drink from turning bitter.

“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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