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Cherry Soup

A soup made with sour cherries, sugar, stale bread, lemon juice, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cherry Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and pit the sour cherries.

  2. Boil the cherries in a little water with sugar until done.

  3. Soak the stale bread in cold water until soft, preferably the day before.

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the soaked bread, lemon juice, and salt.

  2. Boil for ten minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Add the cooked cherries to the mixture and set aside.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sour cherries
Provide the main fruit flavour and tartness, and their juices give the soup its body.
Sugar
Sweetens the soup and balances the sourness of the cherries and lemon.
Stale bread
Soaks up liquid and breaks down into a soft, thickening base for the soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and sharpens the cherry taste.

The step that matters

Boil the bread mixture for ten minutes, stirring constantly. Stirring keeps the soaked bread from scorching on the bottom of the pan and helps it break down evenly into a smooth, thickened base before the cherries are added.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, bread):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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