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Brandied Fruits

A preserved fruit mixture sweetened with sugar and infused with alcohol, made by layering fruit and sugar in a jar and sealing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 342 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Brandied Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select the largest and soundest strawberries and place them in a clean two-gallon stone jar.

  2. Cover the strawberries with 2 pounds of granulated sugar.

  3. Stone the cherries and add them to the jar with the same amount of sugar.

  4. For other fruits like bananas, pineapples, or oranges, ensure to weigh them and add 1 pound of sugar for every pound of fruit.

Add alcohol and store

  1. Dissolve 5 cents worth of salicylic acid in 1 pint of pure alcohol and pour it over the fruit.

  2. Seal the jar with thick paper and add more fruits in season, maintaining the same sugar-to-fruit ratio.

  3. In the fall, pack the mixture into glass jars and store in a dry, cool place.

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. Peach + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Apricot + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Peach + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Peach + red curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together33 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Red currant + plumtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberries
Provide the main fruit base, whose sugar and alcohol soak firm and preserve it.
Granulated sugar
Draws moisture out of the fruit and preserves it, giving the mixture its sweetness.
Cherries
Add fruity flavor and color to the mixture as the main fruit alongside strawberries.
Pure alcohol
Acts as a preservative that keeps the fruit from spoiling during long storage.

The step that matters

Sealing the jar and adding fruit in season. Keeping the sugar-to-fruit ratio correct matters, because sugar and alcohol together preserve the fruit. Too little sugar or alcohol can let the fruit ferment or spoil.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, peach, apricot, plum):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, peach, apricot, plum. 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.

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