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Dessert

Preserved Cherries

A method for preserving cherries in a sugar syrup sealed with brandy paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Preserved Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stone the cherries and weigh them.

  2. Dissolve the sugar in 1 pint of water.

Cook

  1. Add the cherries to the sugar solution and bring to a boil.

  2. Boil for 30 minutes until it begins to thicken.

Pot and seal

  1. Transfer to pots and cover with brandy paper to seal.

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

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

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

Cherries
Provide the fruit that is preserved, softening and releasing juice as they simmer in syrup.
Loaf sugar
Dissolves into the water to make a syrup that preserves the fruit and sweetens it.
Water
Dissolves the sugar into a syrup that the cherries cook in.

The step that matters

Boiling until it begins to thicken. Sugar concentration rises as water evaporates, and the syrup needs to reach a thick enough state to help preserve the fruit. Stopping too early may leave the preserve thin and less stable.

“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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