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Drink

Currant Water

A chilled beverage made from mashed currants, water, syrup, cochineal, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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

  1. Mash the currants in a pan with the water.

  2. Add the syrup and cochineal, then mix well.

  3. Optionally, add a little lemon juice for flavor before straining.

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

  5. Chill the strained liquid in ice before serving.

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 juice for the drink.
Syrup
Adds sweetness to balance the tart currant juice.
Cochineal
Adds a red colour to the drink.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (red currant, syrup):

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red currant, syrup. 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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