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Brandied Morella Cherries

A preserve of ripe Morella cherries sweetened with sugar-candy and soaked in French brandy.

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 ↓

Brandied Morella Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Gather ripe Morella cherries and cut off half the length of the stalks.

  2. Place the cherries gently into clean, dry quart bottles with wide necks.

  3. Leave enough space in each bottle for 4 ounces of sugar-candy.

  4. Fill the bottles completely with the best French brandy.

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 and its juice, which flavours the brandy as the cherries steep.
Sugar-candy
Adds sweetness and slowly dissolves to balance the sharpness of the fruit and spirit.
French brandy
Acts as the alcohol base that extracts flavour from the cherries and keeps the fruit preserved.

“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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