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To Preserve Cherries for Tarts

Preserves cherries by pricking, sugaring, boiling, and adding brandy, then storing in a cool place.

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 ↓

To Preserve Cherries for Tarts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherries

  1. Prick each cherry three or four times with a needle.

  2. Place the cherries in a dish, sift sugar over them, and let them sit overnight.

Make the syrup

  1. The next day, put the cherries into a boiling syrup for one day.

  2. Remove the cherries and boil the syrup until it reaches a strong consistency.

  3. Add a little brandy to the syrup and mix it with the cherries.

Store

  1. Once cold, transfer the mixture into glasses, cover with bladder and leather, and store in a cool place.

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

Morella cherries
Provide the fruit that is pricked, sugared and preserved in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the cherries and, as a thick syrup, helps preserve the fruit.
Brandy
Adds aroma and helps keep the preserved cherries from spoiling.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup to a strong consistency. Sugar concentration controls preservation. If the syrup is too thin after the cherries are removed, it will not hold the fruit well, and the cherries may spoil in storage.

“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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