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Dessert

Black-Currant Paste, or Drops

A sweet paste made by reducing black currants with sugar, then piped into drops and baked until dry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Black-Currant Paste, or Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pulp

  1. Pass the black currants through a sieve.

  2. Reduce the currant pulp over the fire until thick.

Make the paste

  1. Weigh the pulp and add an equal weight of loaf sugar.

  2. Clarify the sugar and boil it until it reaches a feather stage.

  3. Mix the sugar with the currant pulp and let it cool.

Shape and dry

  1. Transfer the mixture into a piping bag and pipe small drops onto lightly buttered tin plates.

  2. Place the plates in a warm oven until the drops are dry enough to detach.

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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Black currant + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants
Provide the main fruit flavour and the pectin-rich pulp that sets the paste.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and, once boiled and cooled, helps the paste set firm and hold its shape.

The step that matters

Reducing the currant pulp until thick. The pulp must lose enough water over heat to thicken properly. Undercooked pulp stays wet and will not set into drops that detach, while overcooking can make the paste stiff and dull in flavour.

Swap the black currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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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