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Currant Shrub

Currant Shrub is a fruit syrup made by steeping currants, vinegar, and sugar in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and vinegar work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 188 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Currant Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pit the currants.

  2. Place the pitted currants in a pot with the cold water over low heat, ensuring they heat slowly but do not boil.

  3. Heat until the currants are broken and the juice flows easily.

  4. Add the vinegar.

  5. Let the mixture stand for five hours.

  6. Squeeze the juice from the mixture.

  7. Measure the juice.

Make the syrup

  1. For every pint of juice, add one pound of white sugar.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Let it cook for fifteen minutes.

  4. Cool the mixture.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the mixture.

  2. Seal the bottle.

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. Red currant + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together188 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the main fruit juice, tartness, and the shrub's characteristic flavor.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the shrub its sharp, tangy character and helps preserve it.
White sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and currants with sweetness and body.

The step that matters

Heat the currants gently. Heating slowly without boiling lets the fruit release its juice gradually and keeps the flavor fresh. Boiling too early can cook off delicate fruit flavor and make the juice harder to extract cleanly.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar. 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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