The sheer delight of Cherries Jubilee

Cherries Jubilee is a dish with real heritage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its name, it was created to celebrate a jubilee: it is thought to have been created by Escoffier for Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee celebration in 1897. It consists of cherries cooked in flaming brandy, and then served warm over vanilla ice cream, although in the original dish it was even more pared down, lacking the ice cream element.

The dish is flambéd, which means that the alcohol from the kirsch is ignited with an open flame, and cooked off quickly. Of course, safety is paramount: don’t let your six year old nephew take charge of this bit, make sure you’re doing it in an area which doesn’t contain flammable materials, and not in the vicinity of anything else which could catch light. Have a lid on hand, just in case you need to extinguish the flames quickly. It carries its risks, of course, but there are few things to make you feel more competent as a cook than watching the blue flames licking the cherries, before ebbing.

This is the sort of dish which demands to be kept simple: what Nigella would call ‘less of a recipe and more of an idea’, which I rather like as a genre of pudding. There’s no need to attempt to zjuzh it up with extra flavourings or components, complicated ice cream flavours do it no favours; I don’t even add cornflour to thicken the sauce. The joy of this dish is in using ripe cherries, and really good quality vanilla ice cream. The warm, boozy, soft fruit, and the cold ice cream, just beginning to melt where the cherries hit it. Here, I marinade the stoned cherries in the kirsch for a couple of hours before flambéeing, so that the alcohol really soaks into the fruit, giving it a kick, and making sure the fruit is tender and toothsome.