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Dessert

Currant Water Ice

A chilled ice cream made from red currant jelly, boiling water, lemon juice, clarified sugar, and optional cochineal for color.

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 Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Dissolve the red currant jelly in boiling water.

  2. Add the juice of one lemon and clarified sugar to taste.

  3. If needed, add a little cochineal for color.

Freeze

  1. Let the mixture cool, then freeze it according to your ice cream maker's instructions.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Red currant jelly
Provides the main currant flavor, color and sweetness of the ice cream.
Clarified sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the frozen texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the currant flavor.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before freezing. A warm base takes longer to chill in the ice cream maker, which can produce larger ice crystals and a coarser, icier texture. Cooling it first helps the mixture freeze smoothly.

Swap the red currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar. 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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