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Stewed Pitted Cherries

A sweet stew of pitted cherries simmered in warm water with brown sugar and thickened with browned flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Stewed Pitted Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Wash the cherries thoroughly.

  2. Put the cherries in warm water and add brown sugar.

  3. Stew until very tender.

Thicken and cool

  1. Stir in browned flour and cook until the syrup is the consistency of rich cream.

  2. Set aside to cool.

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 + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries
Provide the fruit, the main flavor, and the soft texture of the stewed dish.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, caramel-like flavor to the syrup.
Browned flour
Its starch thickens the cherry syrup to a rich, creamy consistency when cooked.

The step that matters

Stir in browned flour and cook until the syrup is the consistency of rich cream. Flour starch only thickens fully when heated, and it needs to cook long enough to lose its raw taste. Stopping early leaves a thin syrup or a floury flavor, while overcooking can make it stiff as it cools.

“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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