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Preserve

To Preserve Cherries

A method for preserving cherries by boiling them with sugar and currant juice to create 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

Start the cherries

  1. Combine cherries and sugar in a pot.

  2. Wet the sugar with currant juice.

  3. Boil until dissolved.

  4. Add the cherries.

  5. Cook until they are clear enough to see the stones.

  6. If desired, remove the stones.

Make the syrup and finish

  1. Add more sugar than cherries.

  2. Let it sit overnight to create syrup.

  3. Pour the syrup into the pot and boil.

  4. Add the cherries.

  5. Cook until soft.

  6. If the 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
Provide the fruit that softens and becomes the preserved product.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws out water to form a thick syrup.
Currant juice
Adds tartness and flavor to balance the sweetness of the sugar.

The step that matters

Cook the cherries until clear, then until soft. Sugar must fully dissolve before the fruit is added, and the fruit must cook long enough for sugar to penetrate and replace water. Stopping early leaves a thin syrup and firm fruit that may spoil sooner.

“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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