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To Preserve Cherries

This recipe preserves cherries by cooking them with sugar and currant juice to produce a syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

To Preserve Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine cherries and sugar in a pot.

  2. Wet the sugar with currant juice.

  3. Boil until dissolved.

  4. Add cherries.

  5. Cook until they are clear and you can see the stones.

  6. Remove stones.

  7. Add more sugar to them.

  8. Let the mixture sit overnight to create syrup.

Finish the cherries

  1. Pour syrup into a kettle.

  2. Bring to a boil.

  3. Add cherries and cook until soft.

  4. If syrup is thin, add more sugar.

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 + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Cherries
Form the fruit that is softened and preserved in the sugar syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens and, at high concentration, thickens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
Currant juice
Adds acidity and fruity flavor to the syrup.

The step that matters

Cook until they are clear and you can see the stones. Sugar must fully penetrate the fruit before the syrup is thickened, otherwise the cherries shrink and toughen. Cooking gently until the fruit turns clear shows the sugar has replaced its water, which helps it keep its shape and stay preserved.

“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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