Name: Juice of Red Currants
Ingredients: 2 pounds ripe red currants; ½ cup strawberry juice

Why it works: Red currant and strawberry work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 83 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Juice of Red Currants

Ingredients

2 pounds ripe red currants
½ cup strawberry juice

Directions

Extract the juice

Gather ripe red currants and crush them using a fine sieve.
Press the remaining pulp in the sieve to extract all the juice.

Blend and finish

Mix the extracted juice with the strawberry juice.
Pass the mixture through a finer sieve.
Bottle the juice and process it in a water bath until it reaches a gentle boil.

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.

Red currant + strawberrytop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together83 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants: Supply the main juice and a sharp, tart fruit flavour.
Strawberry juice: Adds fruity aroma and mellows the tartness of the currant juice.

“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.