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Drink

Cherry Shrub

A sweetened cherry spirit syrup made by extracting juice from cherries, mixing with sugar, and adding alcohol.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cherry and spirit work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Cherry Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Remove the cherries from their stalks and place them in an earthen pot.

  2. Set the pot in an iron pot of boiling water, ensuring no water enters the cherries.

  3. Once the juice is extracted, strain it through a thick cloth bag to separate the juice from the pulp.

Sweeten and bottle

  1. Mix 1 pound of sugar with 1 pint of the cherry juice until clear.

  2. Before bottling, add ½ cup of spirit to each bottle.

  3. Seal the bottles with corks covered in rosin.

Store

  1. Store in a dry, cool place; it will keep all summer and is delicious mixed with water.

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. Cherry + spirittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Sugar + cherrytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,598 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + spirittop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Morello or red sour cherries
Supply the tart flavour and the juice that forms the base of the shrub.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart juice and helps preserve it during storage.
Cherry juice
Forms the liquid base that carries the cherry flavour and is sweetened.
Spirit
Adds aroma and helps the bottled shrub keep longer.

The step that matters

Setting the pot in boiling water without letting water reach the cherries. Gentle heat from the surrounding water draws out juice without cooking the fruit. If water gets in, it dilutes the juice and weakens the flavour, so the cherries and juice must stay sealed off from it.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, spirit. 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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