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Currant Ice Water

A chilled beverage made from currant juice, sugar, and ice water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Currant Ice Water

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Press the juice from ripe currants and strain it.

  2. Add 1 pound of sugar to every pint of juice.

  3. Dissolve the sugar by stirring it in a saucepan over heat or by placing it in bottles in a saucepan of cold water and heating gradually to boiling.

Bottle and store

  1. Once dissolved and cooled, cork and seal the bottles.

  2. Store in a cool, dry place.

Serve

  1. Mix with ice water or Shasta water to serve.

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. 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

Currant juice
Provides the tart, fruity flavour that forms the base of the drink.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and dissolves into it, balancing the currants' acidity.

The step that matters

Dissolving the sugar fully. Sugar must dissolve completely into the juice before cooling and bottling. Undissolved crystals can settle or recrystallise in the bottle, and gentle heating helps them dissolve without scorching the 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.

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