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Dessert

Buttered Cherries.

A dessert of cherries cooked with 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

Prepare the bread

  1. In a skillet, melt 1½ tablespoons of butter and fry the bread until light brown.

  2. Remove the bread and pour out the butter from the pan.

Cook the cherries

  1. Add the remaining 1½ tablespoons of butter to the pan and warm the cherries over moderate heat.

  2. Sprinkle the sugar over the cherries and stir gently.

  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 serving dish and pour the cherries over it. 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
Soaks up butter and cherry juices while frying to a light brown, giving a crisp, savoury base.
Butter
Fries the bread and enriches the cherries, adding richness and a toasted, buttery aroma.
Cherries
Provide the main fruit flavour and juicy, tender texture once cooked.
Sugar
Sweetens the cherries and helps form a syrupy sauce as they cook.

The step that matters

Cooking the cherries until tender. Cooking the cherries with sugar and water for 15 minutes softens the fruit and draws out juice to form a syrup. Stopping too early leaves them firm, while overcooking can break them down and make the sauce thin or pasty.

“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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