Name: Cherry Pickles
Ingredients: 1 quart cherries, pitted; 1 cup sugar; hot sweet vinegar (see proportions above)

Why it works: Sugar and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Cherry Pickles

Ingredients

1 quart cherries, pitted
1 cup sugar
hot sweet vinegar (see proportions above)

Directions

Prepare

Seed the cherries and let them stand overnight with 1 cup of sugar.
Drain off the juice and bottle the cherries.

Pickle and seal

Pour hot sweet vinegar over the cherries, using some of the cherry juice to replace part of the vinegar.
Seal the bottles.

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 + vinegartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,806 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

Cherries: Provide the fruit, which softens and becomes tender in the sweet vinegar.
Sugar: Draws moisture from the cherries and sweetens the finished pickle.

“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.