Name: Ratafia De Cerises
Ingredients: 16 pounds Morella cherries, bruised; 2 gallons spirit; 4 pounds loaf sugar; Distilled water

Why it works: Spirit and sugar work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Ratafia De Cerises

Ingredients

16 pounds Morella cherries, bruised
2 gallons spirit
4 pounds loaf sugar
Distilled water

Directions

Infuse

Combine bruised Morella cherries and spirit in a container.
Infuse for three weeks.
Strain the mixture.

Sweeten and bottle

Add distilled water to the strained mixture.
Dissolve loaf sugar in a small amount of water to make a syrup, then add to the mixture.
Bottle the final product.

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.

Spirit + sugartop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together602 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

Morella cherries: Supply the main cherry flavor and color for the finished liqueur.
Spirit: Extracts flavor from the cherries and acts as the preserving base of the drink.
Loaf sugar: Adds sweetness that balances the spirit and the cherry tartness.

“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.