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Drink

Champagne, Currant

A fermented currant wine made with sugar, water, yeast, and clarified with isinglass.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: White currant and red currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Champagne, Currant

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 4 pounds of loaf sugar and 6 quarts of water in a saucepan.

  2. Skim the mixture until it becomes a clear syrup.

Ferment

  1. Pour the syrup over 1 quart each of white and red currants, stripped from their stalks.

  2. Let it stand for 1.5 hours.

  3. Stir in 2 tablespoons of yeast.

  4. Allow it to ferment for 2 days, stirring frequently.

Strain and clarify

  1. Strain through a coarse bag into a small cask.

  2. Finely clarify with ¼ ounce of isinglass.

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. White currant + red curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + red curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + white curranttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
White currants
Contribute tart juice and fruit flavour to the wine.
Red currants
Contribute tart juice, colour and fruit flavour to the wine.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide that give the drink its character.
Isinglass
Fining agent that collects suspended particles so the finished drink becomes clear.

The step that matters

Skim the syrup until clear. Skimming removes impurities and foam that rise from the boiling sugar water. Leaving them in can cloud the liquid and add off-flavours during fermentation.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, red currant. 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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