Name: 66 Currant Sauce No. 2
Ingredients: 1 cup water simmer all together until currants are broken; 1 small head celery--1 pt; 4 tablespns; 1/2 teaspn

Why it works: Currant and celery work together. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 159 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

66 Currant Sauce No. 2

Ingredients

1 cup water simmer all together until currants are broken
1 small head celery--1 pt
4 tablespns
1/2 teaspn

Directions

Combine 1 quart currants, 1 small head celery (1 pt), finely sliced, 3 or 4 tablespoons sugar, ½ teaspoon salt, and 1 cup water.
Simmer all together until the currants are broken.
Seal the sauce in jars.
Alternatively, cook the celery in salted water, add the currants and sugar, and cook until the currants are broken only.

By Evora Bucknum Perkins. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

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 + celerytop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together159 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Currants: Provide the main fruit body and tartness that the sauce is built around.
Celery: Adds a subtle savoury, aromatic background to the sauce.
Sugar (in the method): Sweetens the sauce and balances the sharpness of the currants.

“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.