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Drink

Cherry Cordial

A sweet cherry liqueur made by boiling cherry juice, dissolving sugar, adding spirits, and bottling when cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cherry and spirit work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Cherry Cordial

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil and skim the cherry juice.

  2. Dissolve the sugar in ½ cup of water and bring to a boil.

Mix and bottle

  1. Strain the sugar mixture and mix it with the cherry juice.

  2. Add ½ pint of spirits to the mixture.

  3. Bottle the cordial when it is cold.

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. Cherry + spirittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Cherry + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,598 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + spirittop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cherry juice
Provides the main fruit flavor, colour and liquid body of the cordial.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and a syrupy body that balances the tartness of the juice.
Spirits
Adds alcohol, aroma and warmth to the finished cordial.

The step that matters

Adding the spirits. Alcohol is volatile and heat drives it off, so the spirits lose aroma and strength if added to a hot mixture. Letting the mixture cool before adding them keeps the spirit's character in the finished cordial.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, spirit. 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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