Skip to main content
Drink

Black Currant Drink

A chilled black currant beverage thickened with rice flour, sweetened with sugar and lemon juice.

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

Why it works: Lemon and black currant 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 allow it to simmer for about 20 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Mix the rice flour with a little cold water and pour it into the strained mixture.

  5. Stir over heat until the mixture is clear.

Cool

  1. Let it cool in a cool place until cold.

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. Lemon + black curranttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together53 recipes

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

  2. Rice + black curranttop 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. Flour + sugartop 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 fruit flavour, colour and sweetness in the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the currants and lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the black currant.
Rice flour
Thickens the liquid slightly so it has a smoother body.

The step that matters

Adding the rice flour mixture. Rice flour must be mixed smooth with cold water first, then stirred into the hot liquid, so it thickens evenly without forming lumps.

Swap the black currant

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

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

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

You might also like

Rice WaterRice Water82 recipesRice MilkRice Milk37 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipes