Name: Currant Wine
Ingredients: 70 pounds red currants, bruised and pressed; 10 pounds brown sugar; water, sufficient to fill a 15-gallon cask

Why it works: Red currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Currant Wine

Ingredients

70 pounds red currants, bruised and pressed
10 pounds brown sugar
water, sufficient to fill a 15-gallon cask

Directions

Prepare

Bruise and press the red currants.

Ferment

Combine the currants with brown sugar and enough water to fill a 15-gallon cask.
Allow the mixture to ferment to yield a pleasant red wine that is rather tart but keeps well.

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.

Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,156 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants: Provide the juice, flavour and natural acidity that give the wine its tartness and colour.
Brown sugar: Supplies the sugar that yeast converts to alcohol during fermentation.

“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.