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Dessert

Currants for Cakes

A preparation of currants soaked, dried, and floured for use in cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,077 recipes. The science ↓

Currants for Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash and pick the currants.

  2. Pour boiling water over the currants in a basin and cover with a plate.

  3. Let them stand for 1 minute, then drain the water.

  4. Spread the currants on a cloth to absorb moisture.

  5. Place the currants on a dish in a cool oven, turning occasionally until dry.

  6. Dust a little flour over the dried currants before use.

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 + flourtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

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 and chewy texture in the cake once they are dried and floured.
Flour
Light dusting helps keep the dried currants from sinking to the bottom of the batter.

The step that matters

Drying the currants thoroughly. Any moisture left on the currants will be absorbed into the batter, making it wetter and can cause the fruit to sink. Drying them well before dusting with flour helps them stay suspended and distributed through the cake.

“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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