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Dessert

Buttered Cherries.

A dessert of cherries simmered in butter and sugar, served over fried stale bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Buttered Cherries.

Ingredients

Directions

Fry the bread

  1. Fry the diced stale bread in 1 ounce of butter until light brown, then remove from the pan.

Cook the cherries

  1. Pour out the butter, add the remaining 1 ½ ounces of butter, and warm the cherries in it.

  2. Stir in the sugar and keep the mixture over moderate heat.

  3. Gradually pour in the hot water and cook for 15 minutes until the cherries are tender.

Serve

  1. Place the fried bread on a hot dish and pour the cherries over it.

  2. Serve immediately.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Fried in butter, it forms a crisp, golden base for the cherries.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour, and helps brown the bread.
Kentish cherries
Main fruit; cooking softens them and releases their juices into the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cherry juices form a syrupy sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually pour in the hot water. Adding the water slowly keeps the sugar and cherry juices from cooling sharply and seizing, so the sauce stays smooth and the cherries cook 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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