Name: Currant Wine
Ingredients: 4 quarts currants; 6 pints water; 1 pound sugar

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 Wine

Ingredients

4 quarts currants
6 pints water
1 pound sugar

Directions

Prepare the juice

Stem the currants and mash them.
Add 6 pints of water to the mashed currants and let it stand for 2 days.
Pass the mixture through a colander or sieve.
For every quart of juice, add 1 pound of sugar and dissolve thoroughly.

Ferment and bottle

Transfer to a jug and cover with a cloth, leaving the cork out.
Let it remain for 10 to 12 days, then strain again and bottle for 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.

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

Currants: Provide the fruit juice and flavour that form the body of the wine.
Sugar: Feeds the fermentation and sweetens the finished wine.
Water: Draws juice from the mashed currants and dilutes the mixture for 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.