Name: To Make Currant Wine
Ingredients: full ripe currants; 2 quarts water (boiled and cooled) per gallon of pulp; 2.5 pounds white sugar per gallon of liquor; 1 quart best-resided spirits of wine per gallon of liquor

Why it works: Spirit and wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 701 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

To Make Currant Wine

Ingredients

full ripe currants
2 quarts water (boiled and cooled) per gallon of pulp
2.5 pounds white sugar per gallon of liquor
1 quart best-resided spirits of wine per gallon of liquor

Directions

Prepare the juice

Strip and bruise the currants in a mortar.
For every gallon of pulp, add 2 quarts of boiled and cooled water.
Let the mixture stand in a tub to ferment.
Run it through a hair sieve without touching it.

Add sugar and spirit

To every gallon of the liquor, add 2.5 pounds of white sugar and stir well.
Add 1 quart of the best-resided spirits of wine for every gallon.

Rest and bottle

Let it stand for six weeks before bottling.

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.

Spirit + winetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together701 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).
Currant + winetop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,323 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Currant + spirittop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together34 recipes
Sugar + spirittop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together602 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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 the fruit flavour, acidity and pectin-rich pulp that forms the base of the wine.
White sugar: Sweetens the wine and feeds the fermentation that turns the liquor into wine.
Spirits of wine: Fortifies the wine, adding alcohol that helps preserve it and gives body.