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Dessert

Brandied Cherries

Preserved cherries soaked in brandy and syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Brandied Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherries

  1. Remove the stems from the cherries or clip them within an inch of the fruit.

  2. In a preserving kettle, combine sugar and water; boil and skim until clear.

  3. Scald the cherries in the syrup for 2–3 minutes without breaking the skins.

  4. Remove the cherries with a skimmer and spread them on dishes to cool.

Make the brandy syrup

  1. Make additional syrup by boiling 1 pound of sugar with ½ pint of water or thin syrup until clear; cool it.

  2. Mix the cooled syrup with an equal amount of French brandy.

Bottle and seal

  1. Place the cherries in wide‑mouthed bottles, pour the syrup over them, cork tightly, and seal with melted resin and wax.

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. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Syrup + brandytop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together561 recipes

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Large sweet cherries
Provide the fruit that is scalded and then preserved whole in the syrup.
Sugar
Makes the syrup that sweetens the cherries and helps preserve them.
French brandy
Adds alcohol and flavour to the syrup, helping to preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Scald the cherries without breaking the skins. Brief scalding in hot syrup softens the fruit enough to take up syrup while the skins stay intact. Boiling too long or too hard can split the skins, letting the fruit break down and spoil.

“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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