Why it works: Black currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓
Black Currant Paste.
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the pulp
Pass the currants through a fine sieve.
Put the currant pulp into a pan and boil for 15 minutes.
Remove the pan from the heat and weigh the pulp.
Make the paste
Add 1 pound of loaf sugar to each pound of pulp and mix well.
Finish as you would for other fruit pastes.
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.
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Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together393 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Black currants
- Provide the fruit pulp that forms the body and flavour of the paste.
- Loaf sugar
- Sweetens the paste and, as it cooks down, helps it thicken and set firm.
The step that matters
Boiling the pulp for 15 minutes. Boiling drives off water and concentrates the pulp, so the paste can set firm once sugar is added. Pulp left too wet may stay soft and fail to set.
“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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