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Dessert

Cherry Gâteau

A gelatin dessert made with cherries, sugar syrup, and cherry kernels, served with cream or custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cherry Gâteau

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the gelatine in 1 cup of water for 1 hour.

  2. Remove the stalks and stones from the cherries.

Make the mixture

  1. Boil the sugar in ½ pint of water for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the cherries and boil for another 10 minutes.

  3. Dissolve the gelatine in a little of the syrup and add it to the cherries.

  4. Add the cherry kernels and color the mixture with cochineal.

Mold and serve

  1. Pour the preparation into a damp mold with a small container in the center.

  2. When ready to serve, turn it out into a glass dish and fill the center with cream or custard.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  3. Cherry + creamtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together827 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the cherry syrup into a firm, sliceable jelly.
Cherries
Provide the main fruit flavor and bulk of the dessert.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps give the jelly its body.

The step that matters

Dissolving the gelatine in the syrup. Gelatine must dissolve fully in warm, not boiling, syrup before it is added to the cherries. Undissolved granules leave gritty specks, and overheated gelatine loses some of its setting power, so the jelly may not firm properly.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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