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Drink

Currant Ice Water

A sweetened currant beverage made by pressing currants, adding sugar, and serving with ice water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 Ice Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Press the juice from the currants and strain it.

  2. Add 1 pound of sugar for each pint of juice.

Bottle and store

  1. Pour the mixture into bottles, cork, and seal them.

  2. Store in a cool, dry place.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, mix with ice-water or add water to taste.

  2. Make it very sweet and freeze it.

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 + 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 main flavor and tartness of the juice.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the currants' acidity.

The step that matters

Add the sugar before bottling. Sugar balances the sharp acidity of the currant juice and helps preserve it. Too little sugar leaves the drink sour and less stable in storage.

“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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