Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Dried Cherries
Ingredients
Directions
Beat the egg whites until just broken.
Dip the fine stems of cherries into the egg whites.
Coat the cherries with powdered sugar.
Place the cherries on a sieve to dry.
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.
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Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together122,807 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Whites of eggs
- Act as a binder that helps the powdered sugar stick evenly to the cherries.
- Powdered sugar
- Forms a sweet, dry coating on the outside of the cherries as they dry.
- Cherries
- Provide the fruit that loses moisture as it dries, concentrating its flavor.
The step that matters
Beat the egg whites until just broken. Egg whites that are only lightly beaten are thin enough to coat the cherries evenly. Overbeating them into a stiff foam makes the coating clumpy and uneven, so the sugar will not stick uniformly.
“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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