Skip to main content
Drink

Currant Water

A chilled beverage made by mashing currants, adding water and syrup, and straining the mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Red currant and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Currant Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick and mash the currants in a pan.

  2. Add water and syrup, then mix well.

  3. Strain the mixture through a flannel bag 3-4 times.

Chill and finish

  1. Chill the strained liquid in ice.

  2. Optionally, add a little water before boiling and strain again, then add lemon juice for flavor.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

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

  2. Syrup + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Red currant + syruptop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together76 recipes

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 flavor, tartness and red color of the drink.
Syrup
Adds sweetness to balance the tart currant juice.
Water
Dilutes the currant juice to a drinkable strength.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and brightness to the finished drink.

The step that matters

Straining the mashed currants. Straining several times removes pulp and seeds that would make the drink cloudy and gritty. Pressing the bag too hard forces fine solids through, so let the juice drip through gently.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (syrup, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, lemon. 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.

More currant water recipes

Ice 9Red Ice 3 See all 25 →

You might also like

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrgeat SyrupOrgeat Syrup13 recipes