Name: Preserved Cherries
Ingredients: fine, large sour cherries; white sugar (equal weight to cherries); 1 teacupful water for each pound of cherries; 1 pint red currant juice (optional); ½ pound sugar (optional, for sweet cherries)

Why it works: Sugar and red currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Preserved Cherries

Ingredients

fine, large sour cherries
white sugar (equal weight to cherries)
1 teacupful water for each pound of cherries
1 pint red currant juice (optional)
½ pound sugar (optional, for sweet cherries)

Directions

Prepare the cherries

Remove stems and pits from the cherries, saving any juice.
For each pound of cherries, combine an equal weight of sugar with 1 teacupful of water in a pot.
Heat the mixture over medium heat until the sugar dissolves and it reaches a boil.

Cook and cool

Add the saved juice and cherries to the syrup, boiling gently until the cherries are clear.
Use a skimmer to remove the cherries and spread them on flat dishes to cool.
Boil the syrup until it thickens, then let it cool and settle.

Jar and seal

Place the cherries in jars and pour the syrup over them.
Leave the jars open overnight, then cover them securely.

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 + red curranttop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,156 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

Sour cherries: Provide the fruit that is cooked until clear and holds its shape in the syrup.
White sugar: Sweetens the fruit and forms the syrup that preserves it by drawing out water.
Water: Dissolves the sugar so it can form a syrup that the cherries cook in.

The step that matters

Boiling the cherries gently in the syrup. Vigorous boiling can split or break the cherries and make the syrup cloudy. A gentle simmer lets the fruit turn clear while keeping its shape and letting sugar penetrate evenly.

“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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Preserved Cherries