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Wild-cherry Bounce

A homemade cherry liqueur made by macerating wild cherries with sugar and brandy or whiskey.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Wild-cherry Bounce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherries

  1. Pick over wild cherries.

  2. Wash wild cherries.

  3. Pack cherries in small glass jars, layering with sugar.

  4. Bruise the cherries with a small stick to release juice.

  5. Use 5 tablespoons of sugar for each quart jar.

Steep

  1. Pour in enough brandy or whiskey to fill the jar between the fruit and sugar.

  2. Return to each jar until the contents are saturated and liquor stands on top.

  3. Screw on covers and let sit for 4 months.

Strain and bottle

  1. After 4 months, turn contents into a bowl.

  2. Crush the contents with a potato masher.

  3. Strain through a coarse cloth.

  4. Squeeze out a cupful at a time.

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

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

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

Wild cherries
Provide the main fruit flavour and juice for the liqueur.
Sugar
Sweetens the liqueur and draws juice out of the cherries.
Brandy or whiskey
Acts as the alcohol base that extracts and preserves the cherry flavour.

“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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