Cherry preserves substitutes

Frozen dark sweet or sour cherries simmered with sugar and lemon until thick and glossy.

Best for

Linzer torte, thumbprints, cheesecake topping, duck sauce, cake filling, toast

Fifteen to twenty minutes and unquestionably the best result, since frozen cherries are pitted, cheap and available all year. Simmer them with the sugar and lemon, mashing a few against the pan, until a spoonful chilled on a cold plate holds a line drawn through it. Frozen sour cherries give you real sour cherry preserves; frozen dark sweet cherries need the full tablespoon of lemon or they taste cloying. Cherries are low in pectin, so if you want a firm set for a pastry filling add a teaspoon of cornstarch or a grated apple. This is a fridge preserve, good about two weeks; for jars on the shelf, follow a tested recipe from the National Center for Home Food Preservation as written.

Clear, firm, sharply tart jelly from strained red currant juice.

Best for

Linzer torte, duck and venison sauces, glazes, cheese boards, sandwich cookies, Cumberland sauce

The best match for what sour cherry preserves actually do, which is bring acidity against buttery pastry, rich meat or a fatty cheese. It is bright, sharp and glossy and melts well into a sauce. Two things change: the colour goes translucent scarlet rather than deep brick red, and because it is strained there is no fruit texture at all, so a thumbprint cookie loses the little chewy pieces of cherry. In a Linzer it works beautifully; in a cobbler it is too thin and too smooth.

Ordinary raspberry jam, seedless if possible, sharpened with a little lemon.

Best for

Linzer bars, thumbprints, jam sandwich biscuits, cake fillings, trifle, toast

The realistic pantry answer and the traditional alternative in a lot of Austrian and German baking anyway. Raspberry keeps the deep red colour and a similar level of tartness once the lemon is in, and the set is close. The obvious difference is aroma: raspberry is perfumed and floral where cherry is deeper and slightly almond-scented, which is why cherry pairs so naturally with almond pastry. Add a couple of drops of almond extract if you want to bridge that gap; a very little goes a long way.

Dark, fairly tart jams with a similar depth of colour and a firm set.

Best for

Linzer torte, sachertorte, duck sauce, filled buns, kolache, toast

A strong swap wherever the recipe wants dark and tart rather than specifically cherry. Damson is the sharpest and closest in character; ordinary sweet plum jam is much milder and reads as simply sweet, so add lemon juice; blackberry is very close in colour with a rounder, jammier flavour. Because these are usually thicker than cherry preserves, they behave better inside pastry and are less likely to boil out of a lattice, which makes them a practical upgrade as well as a substitute.

Standard strawberry jam or preserves, sweet and soft-set.

Best for

thumbprint cookies, cake fillings, toast, cheesecake swirl, jam bars, pancake topping

Fine when the recipe just needs a sweet red jam, and it is the most likely jar in the house. It is markedly sweeter and less acidic than any cherry preserve, particularly a sour cherry one, so a cheesecake or a Linzer made with it tastes noticeably flatter and one-note. A teaspoon of lemon juice per quarter cup helps considerably. Strawberry jam is also looser than most, so cook it down with a teaspoon of cornstarch before piping it into pastry.

Canned cherry pie filling, which is sour cherries in a starch-thickened sweet syrup.

Best for

cheesecake topping, trifle, cake filling, hand pies, sundae sauce, coffee cake

Very handy, and often actually sour cherries, which most jars of cherry jam are not. Treat it as a wet ingredient: drain some syrup, mash the cherries roughly, and simmer for a few minutes to concentrate it. The set is starchy and slightly glassy rather than pectin-firm, so it looks shinier and can weep after a day, and it is usually sweeter than a preserve. It works far better as a topping or a swirl than as a filling baked inside a delicate pastry, where the starch loosens in the oven and runs.