Name: Cherry Bounce
Ingredients: wild cherries; best white spirits; cold water; 3 pounds sugar; 1 quart water

Why it works: Spirit and sugar work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Cherry Bounce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherry base

Fill a wide-mouthed demijohn nearly full with wild cherries.
Pour in the best white spirits until full. Cork and set aside for 3 to 4 months until dark.
If too dark, add more spirits and strain off the fruit.

Sweeten and bottle

Make a syrup by combining 3 pounds of sugar with 1 quart of water.
Add 1½ gallons of this syrup to 4 gallons of the cherry brandy.
Fill bottles through a funnel lined with flannel. Cork well and store.
The older it becomes, the finer it is.

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.

Spirit + sugartop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together602 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Wild cherries: Provide the fruit flavour and colour that the spirit extracts over months.
Best white spirits: Extract flavour and colour from the cherries and preserve the fruit.
Sugar: Sweetens the finished liqueur and balances the spirit's strength.

“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.