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Drink

Currant Nectar

A sweet drink made by boiling currants, straining, adding sugar, and serving over cracked ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 Nectar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the juice

  1. Bring currants to a boil.

  2. Press the boiled currants through a cheesecloth bag.

  3. Return the liquid to the fire.

  4. Add sugar.

Serve

  1. Fill a goblet a fourth full with the mixture.

  2. Add cracked ice until the goblet is full.

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 juice and the tart, fruity flavor of the nectar.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the currant juice.

“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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