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Dessert

Cherry Preserves

A preserve made from cherries, white currant juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: White currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. The science ↓

Cherry Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherries

  1. Skim the cherries for about fifteen minutes and let them sit until the next day.

  2. Drain the cherries on a sieve.

Make the jam

  1. In a preserving pan, combine the syrup and white currant juice and boil until somewhat reduced and thick.

  2. Add the cherries and boil for about five minutes.

Pot and seal

  1. Remove from heat, skim the syrup, and place the cherries into small pots or wide-mouthed bottles.

  2. Pour the syrup over the cherries and let it cool completely before sealing tightly.

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. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries
Form the bulk of the jam and provide the main fruit flavour and texture.
White currant juice
Adds tartness and natural pectin to help the jam thicken and set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, thickens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Reduce the syrup until thick before adding the cherries. Sugar and pectin only set properly when enough water has evaporated. If the syrup is not reduced and thickened first, the cooked jam will stay runny.

“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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