Name: Stewed Cherries
Ingredients: 1 pound cherries, pitted; ½ pound sugar; cream for serving

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Stewed Cherries

Ingredients

1 pound cherries, pitted
½ pound sugar
cream for serving

Directions

Prepare

Pit the cherries.
In a bowl, combine the cherries and sugar.

Cook and serve

Cook until the cherries are tender.
Remove from heat and let cool.
Serve with cream.

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.

Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries: Provide the main fruit and flavor, softening into a tender, juicy stew when cooked.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and draws juice out of the cherries, helping them form a syrup.

“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.