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Drink

Red Currant Cordial

A sweet alcoholic beverage made by infusing red currants, whiskey, sugar, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and ginger work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Red Currant Cordial

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse

  1. Combine 2 quarts of red currants with 1 quart of whiskey in a container.

  2. Let the mixture sit for 24 hours.

  3. Bruise the currants and strain the mixture through a flannel bag.

Sweeten and finish

  1. Add 1 pound of loaf sugar and ¼ pound of bruised, boiled ginger to the strained liquid.

  2. Let the mixture settle, then strain or filter again.

  3. Bottle, cork, and seal tightly.

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. Red currant + gingertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Red currants
Provide the tart fruit flavour and colour that the whiskey draws out.
Whiskey
Extracts flavour from the fruit and acts as a preservative for the cordial.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the currants and whiskey.
Ginger
Adds a warm, spicy aroma that complements the fruit.

The step that matters

Let the mixture settle, then strain or filter again. Fine sediment from the fruit and ginger can cloud the cordial. Settling lets solids drop out, and a second straining gives a clearer, more stable liquid before bottling.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, ginger):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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