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Dessert

Spiced Cherries

A preserved cherry dessert flavored with vinegar, sugar, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a preserving kettle, combine vinegar and sugar to make a syrup.

  2. Add cherries to the syrup and scald them.

  3. Remove the cherries and place them in a colander.

Spice and combine

  1. Tie 2 teaspoons of cinnamon and 1 teaspoon of cloves in a bag (or use whole spices).

  2. Add the spice bag to the syrup and boil until it thickens enough to cover the cherries.

  3. Return the cherries to the syrup.

  4. Heat thoroughly.

  5. Bottle.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Cinnamon + macetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries
Provide the main fruit, whose flesh softens and absorbs the syrup during scalding and heating.
Sugar
Builds the thick syrup that preserves the fruit and gives it sweetness.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the fruit.
Ginger root
Adds a warm, sharp aroma to the syrup.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, sweet aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until it thickens enough to cover the cherries. Sugar concentration determines thickness and preservation. If the syrup is boiled too briefly, it stays thin, fails to coat the fruit, and the cherries may spoil in storage.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, ginger, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, ginger, clove, cinnamon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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