Skip to main content
Dessert

Brandied Blackberries

A sweet preserve made by cooking blackberry juice with sugar, adding blackberries, brandy, and bottling the mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Blackberry and brandy work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 146 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Brandied Blackberries

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by boiling blackberry juice with sugar.

  2. Add blackberries to the syrup and cook rapidly for about 20 minutes.

Finish and bottle

  1. Remove from heat and add brandy.

  2. Bottle the mixture.

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. Blackberry + brandytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together146 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Blackberry + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Blackberries
Provide the main fruit flavor and body of the finished mixture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and thickens the juice into a syrup that holds the fruit.
Blackberry juice
Supplies the liquid base and concentrated berry flavor for the syrup.
Brandy
Adds aroma and a warm, spirited flavor to the finished fruit.

The step that matters

Add the brandy after removing from heat. Alcohol and many aromatic compounds evaporate when heated, so adding brandy off the heat helps keep its flavor and aroma in the finished mixture.

Swap the blackberry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, brandy):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Blackberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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.

You might also like

Brandy PeachesBrandy Peaches68 recipesBlackberry JellyBlackberry Jelly34 recipesBrandy CreamBrandy Cream21 recipesBrandy PuddingBrandy Pudding13 recipes