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To Dry Currants

A method for drying currants by boiling them in syrup and then oven-drying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

To Dry Currants

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Wash and stem the currants, then layer them in a porcelain kettle.

  2. Dissolve the sugar in water and let it almost boil.

Dry and pack

  1. Skim the currants from the syrup and spread them on plates to dry in a partly cooled oven.

  2. Boil the syrup until thickened, then pour it over the currants and dry them together.

  3. Pack the dried currants in jars and cover them 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. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants
The fruit itself; it shrinks and turns chewy as its moisture is drawn out.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, in a thick syrup, draws out water to help preserve it.

The step that matters

Drying the currants in the partly cooled oven. If the oven is too hot, the outsides harden and cook before the moisture inside can escape. Gentle, slow heat dries the fruit evenly and keeps it tender rather than scorched.

“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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