Name: Currant Sop
Ingredients: thick slices of bread; 1 pint fresh currant juice; ½ pint sugar

Why it works: Bread and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,398 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Currant Sop

Ingredients

thick slices of bread
1 pint fresh currant juice
½ pint sugar

Directions

Prepare

Cut thick slices of bread into 2-inch squares.
Arrange the bread squares in a dish.

Soak and chill

Pour fresh currant syrup made with 1 pint juice and ½ pint sugar over the bread.
Allow to cool, then refrigerate until ready 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.

Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,398 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,256 recipes
Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,638 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Bread: Provides the soft, absorbent structure that soaks up the syrup and gives the pudding its body.
Currant juice: Supplies moisture and tart fruit flavor that soaks into the bread.
Sugar: Sweetens the currant syrup and balances the juice's tartness.