Name: Delicious Acid Drink
Ingredients: 1 pint ripe currants; 1 pint red raspberries; 3 pints cold water; sugar to taste; cracked ice

Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Delicious Acid Drink

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

Mash the currants and raspberries together.
Pour the mixture into a jelly bag and press out all the juice.
Strain the juice through cheesecloth.

Make and serve the drink

Combine the juice with 3 pints of cold water.
Add sugar to taste.
Serve over cracked ice.

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.

Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants: Provide tart acidity and a sharp, fruity flavor that balances the sweetness.
Red raspberries: Add fruity aroma, flavor and a rich red color to the juice.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the fruit juice.

“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.