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Dessert

Cherries in Brandy

A preserved fruit dish of cherries soaked in brandy with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Cherries in Brandy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off half the stalks from the cherries.

  2. Prick each cherry with a needle.

Pack and cover

  1. Place the cherries in a wide-mouthed bottle.

  2. Pound the sugar and add it to the cherries.

  3. Pour brandy over the cherries until they are fully submerged.

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 + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries
Provide the fruit flavour and juice that mixes with the brandy and sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the liquid and draws moisture from the fruit as it dissolves.
Brandy
Preserves the cherries and carries their flavour into the finished liquid.

The step that matters

Pricking each cherry. Pricking the skin lets brandy and sugar penetrate the fruit and flavour it more evenly. Too shallow a prick may do little, while a deep one can bruise the flesh.

“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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