Name: Currant Water
Ingredients: 1 quart of water; 1 pint of fresh-picked currants; 1 heaping tablespoon of powdered 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 Water

Ingredients

1 quart of water
1 pint of fresh-picked currants
1 heaping tablespoon of powdered sugar

Directions

Make the currant water

Simmer the currants in the water for 10 minutes.
When cool, strain the mixture.
Add the powdered sugar after straining.

Serve

Serve chilled.

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

Fresh-picked currants: Provide the main fruit flavor and tartness, and color the water as they release their juice.
Powdered sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the currants' tartness.

“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.