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Dessert

Candied Cherries

Candied cherries are cherries preserved by boiling sugar syrup and drying them.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Candied Cherries

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherries

  1. Wipe the cherries with a clean, dry cloth.

  2. Dip the leaves and stems of the cherries into boiling vinegar and set them upright in a cardboard frame until the vinegar dries.

Make the sugar coating

  1. In a thick saucepan, boil the sugar with cold water, skimming until clear.

  2. Test the sugar by dipping your fingers into cold water, then into the boiling sugar; if it forms a thread when pulled apart, it is ready.

  3. Dip the leaves and stems into the sugar and dry them in the cardboard frame.

  4. Keep the sugar boiling and dip the cherries into it, ensuring they are completely covered.

Dry

  1. Dry the cherries in the cardboard frame in a cool oven.

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 + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 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

Sugar
Forms a clear, thread-stage syrup that hardens into a crisp, glossy coating on the cherries.
Cherries
Provide the fruit that is preserved and coated in the sugar syrup.
Vinegar
Coats the stems and leaves, helping the sugar cling to them when dipped.

The step that matters

Testing the sugar syrup for thread stage. Sugar syrup changes quickly as its water boils off. If it is not cooked to the thread stage, the coating stays sticky; if overcooked, it becomes brittle and may crack or turn grainy.

“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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