Cherries Jubilee Makes Every Scoop of Ice Cream Feel Like a Celebration

Cherries jubilee is one of those desserts that, like bananas Foster, barely qualifies as a fully realized dessert. It’s more of a sauce or a condiment that, once spooned over ice cream, manages to pass as a dessert—one, I should be clear, I am more than happy to cook and eat.

I wonder how Escoffier, the grand-père of classic French cooking and inventor of cherries jubilee thought of it. He’d created the recipe in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (the 60-year anniversary of her rule), and in his version there’s no mention of ice cream. He just puts the cherries in little timbales, poaches them in syrup, thickens it a bit with arrowroot starch, and lights the contents on fire with a splash of Kirsch. If I had been Queen Victoria, I might have been slightly disappointed that the best the world’s greatest French chef could come up with to celebrate me were little cups of flaming candied cherries in syrup.

The original desert is so simple, so basic, so…incomplete that I wouldn’t consider it a dessert worthy of celebration if it hadn’t transitioned into an ice cream topper. Who doesn’t enjoy cold ice cream with a warm, lightly boozy cherry sauce poured on top?

Cherries jubilee is simple, but it also presents an immediate problem, which is that there are many different kinds of cherries one might want to use when making this dessert. I’ve looked at many recipes, and some call for fresh sweet cherries, some call for frozen sweet cherries, and yet more call for frozen or jarred sour cherries. The process for cooking cherries jubilee is fairly similar for all of these types of fruit, but there are slight differences. My goal with this recipe is to provide instructions for all of those cases, so you can make cherries jubilee no matter what cherries you have available.

Let me quickly break down your cherry options and how that alters the recipe, and then I’ll walk you through the flambéing step as well as address questions of sauce ingredients and consistency that many recipes gloss over or avoid entirely.

Choosing Your Cherries for Cherries Jubliee

Escoffier’s original recipe is mum on the type of cherries he used. I’d like to think he opted for a sour cherry, which has a tartness that nicely offsets the sweetness of the caramel they’re cooked in, but who knows, maybe he used sweet. The truth, though, is that cherry season is fleeting and so we may want or even need to use different ones depending on the time of year and our shopping options. My recipe below is written to work for all of these, but let’s take a look now at the pros and cons of each:

Fresh Sweet Cherries

Pros: At the height of their season, fresh cherries are sweet, juicy, flavorful, and plentiful. After a farmers market haul, one might understandably want to turn some of those sweet cherries into jubilee for ice cream.
Cons: Fresh cherries require being pitted, which is tedious and messy even with a dedicated cherry pitter (a chopstick works well in a pinch if you don’t have a cherry pitter—just push it through the cherry to force the pit out). Fresh cherries also have all their juices locked inside, which alters the cooking process: It helps to cover the pan and trap steam to quickly soften them and encourage them to release their juices into the sauce. Sweet cherries are also, well, sweet, which means they can produce a cloying syrupy sauce unless you balance their sweetness with acidity (more on that below).

Frozen Sweet Cherries

Pros: Frozen sweet cherries are typically picked at peak ripeness and then quickly frozen, offering up best-in-season cherries all your round. They’re usually pitted before being frozen, which saves time for the cook. And the freezing process itself is helpful, as the ice crystals cut open the cherries’ cells, releasing their juices to provide more tender cherries and liquid for the sauce before any heat has been applied, which is a convenience in this case.
Cons: Frozen sweet cherries, like fresh sweet cherries, are sweet, so once again a cloying sauce is a potential issue to deal with.

Jarred Sour Cherries in Syrup

Pros: Sour cherries are more tart, which balances the sugar syrup nicely and reduces the risk of a cloying sauce. You can find them jarred in many Middle Eastern, Turkish, and Central European markets. On the plus side, jarred sour cherries last a long time on the shelf, and they come in a light syrup you can use in the sauce. They’re also typically pitted, saving you time and effort.
Cons: Jarred sour cherries require a special shopping trip (or online order) and tend to have had the life cooked out of them in the jarring process, resulting in a duller, greyer, less vibrant cherry in both looks and flavor. This translates to a less vibrant and flavorful sauce.

Frozen Sour Cherries (My Favorite)

Pros: Frozen sour cherries can be found in the freezer section of many Middle Eastern, Turkish, and Central European markets, and they are my favorite for this. As with frozen sweet cherries, these cherries are pitted, cryo-tenderized and juiced (thanks to the ice crystals that form during the freezing process), and, best of all, bursting with vibrant red sour cherry color and flavor. They make the most beautiful, most flavorful cherries jubilee.
Cons: The biggest con here is the shopping trip necessary to find and buy frozen sour cherries. They are otherwise perfect.

What About Fresh Sour Cherries?

Good question! Fresh sour cherries are another great option, but my recipe doesn’t include them here for a simple reason: Their season is so short, and their availability so hyper-localized that it’s difficult to find and develop recipes with them (as luck would have it, I saw some at my market the week after I’d completed work on these recipes). Point being, while they’re a great option, they are the least available of all.

If you do want to use fresh sour cherries, don’t fret, my recipe will just fine for them: Simply follow the instructions for fresh sweet cherries, but keep in mind cooking times may be reduced since sour cherries are smaller and softer than sweet ones (so they will cook down and release their juices more quickly), and they will not require vinegar to balance their flavor at the end.

Cherries Jubilee Ingredients: A Closer Look

Aside from the cherries, the original recipe for cherries jubilee is nothing more than water, sugar, arrowroot, and kirsch. Most modern recipes add to that. Here are some common ingredients, as well as some additions of my own, and how to think about them:

• Water: Water is present simply to help form a syrup and cook the cherries. Of course you don’t need to use water—you can use other liquids, whether juices from the cherries themselves (such as those collected from frozen cherries after defrosting or from a jar of sour cherries in syrup) or another juice like orange juice, which is a typical addition.
• Orange: Let’s take a closer look at oranges here. Many recipes use both the juice and the zest to flavor cherries jubilee. I find that using orange juice is a great step, as it adds subtle complexity to what is otherwise a very one-dimensional sauce. Orange zest, on the other hand, you have to be careful with. I think a very light grating of zest is fine, but add too much and it completely dominates and obscures the cherry flavor, which is a mistake.
• Arrowroot or other starch: Arrowroot is a starch that’s used to thicken the sauce, and it was included in the original recipe. Many modern recipes skip this entirely, and I think that’s a mistake. Even after plenty of reduction and the natural viscosity of a sugary syrup, the sauce in cherries jubilee can end up thin, especially when served still warm. I’ve revived Escoffier’s practice of starch-thickening this sauce in my recipe, except I use a cornstarch slurry instead of arrowroot since the effect is similar but cornstarch is more widely available. The result is a refinement that is worthwhile: A thickened cherry syrup that glazes the ice cream and doesn’t just run off and pool around it.
• Sugar: Sugar is key to forming a proper syrup, and in this case basic granulated sugar works great. Its neutral flavor adds sweetness without other notes like molasses that could compete too much with the cherries.
• Butter: While not a part of the original recipe, some versions make the caramel syrup with the addition of butter, as is the norm in bananas Foster. In this case I don’t think the syrup needs the richness of butter, as I prefer to let the bright fruity flavor of the cherries shine through without butterfat tamping it down, so there is no butter in my recipe.
• Kirsh or other spirit: Kirsh, which is an eau de vie made by distilling fermented cherries, is the most traditional choice for the spirit that goes up in flames in this dish, but you can also use another spirit if you don’t have kirsch. Cognac, armagnac, calvados, rum, and even bourbon would work well in kirsch’s place.
• Vinegar: This is an addition of mine that I only use for sweet cherries. Given how sweet the syrup is, especially when made with sweet cherries, a splash of red wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar (both of which pair nicely with fruity cherries) adds a needed tart note for balance. You could also use lemon juice in a pinch. Sour cherries provide enough of their own tartness that they do not need vinegar.

The Art (and Risks) of Flambé

One of the appeals of cherries jubilee is the flash of flames that erupt from the skillet as soon as the booze is added and set on fire. But it’s also something that can intimidate a cook inexperienced in the art of flambéing. While one can flambé easily and safely, I don’t want to discount the risk—setting something on fire in your kitchen with a live flame that can leap up unpredictably is not without risk, and care must be taken.

The most important thing to know about flambéing is that you should never pour directly from the bottle into the pan when working over a lit gas flame, as the flame can jump up and light the entire bottle on fire in your hand. Instead, measure out the spirit beforehand, and add only that amount to the skillet when directed. I find it easy when working over a gas flame to gently tip the pan until the flame ignites the spirit in the skillet, but I also have a lot of experience doing that. If you’re not comfortable with the pan-tilt method, you can use a long match (like a fireplace match) or one of those grill lighters with the extended neck.

The second most important thing to know about flambéing is that you don’t have to do it. If you don’t feel comfortable with the live flames, simply add the alcohol carefully and simmer for a couple minutes until the sauce has reduced. It won’t be as dramatic, but it also won’t be as dangerous.

No matter what you choose to do, let the cherries jubilee cool just a bit before spooning onto the ice cream, just enough for the most extreme heat to die down and the sauce to thicken even more.