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Dessert

Candied Cherries, Pineapple and Other Fruits

A sweet preserve made by boiling sugar and water, then coating fruit and drying it.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,664 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Candied Cherries, Pineapple and Other Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar in water without stirring until dissolved.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pit the cherries or prepare your chosen fruit.

  2. For pineapple, slice crosswise and dry on a sieve or in the open air.

  3. For oranges, separate into sections and dry like pineapple.

Dip and dry

  1. String the fruit on a thread and dip them in the syrup.

  2. Suspend the dipped fruit by the thread to dry.

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. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + pineappletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Loaf sugar
Forms the syrup that coats the fruit and sets into a sweet, glossy shell as it dries.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can form a syrup that the fruit can be dipped into.
Cherries
Main fruit that is pitted, dipped in syrup, and dried to become candied.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar without stirring. Stirring encourages sugar crystals to form, which can make the syrup grainy instead of smooth. Letting it dissolve undisturbed helps keep the coating clear and even.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Bananafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pineapple. 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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