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Drink

Black Currant Drink

A sweet and tart black currant beverage thickened with rice flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and lemon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Black Currant Drink

Ingredients

Directions

Make the drink

  1. In a saucepan, combine the black currant jelly, sugar, and lemon juice.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the mixture and let it simmer for about 20 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Mix the rice flour with a little cold water and add it to the strained mixture. Stir over heat until the drink is clear.

Cool

  1. Allow to cool in a cool place.

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. Black currant + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together53 recipes

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

  2. Black currant + ricetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currant jelly
Provides the main flavour, colour and sweetness of the drink.
Rice flour
Thickens the strained liquid slightly so it has a little body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the fruit flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Stir over heat until the drink is clear. Rice flour thickens as it heats, and it must be stirred while heating so it disperses evenly without lumps or clouding. Heating it fully also cooks out the raw starch taste.

Swap the black currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, rice, flour. 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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