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Dessert

Black Currant Syrup

A syrup made by mashing black currants, steeping, straining, and optionally cooking with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Black Currant Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick the black currants from the stems and mash them in a bowl or granite saucepan with a potato masher.

  2. Transfer the mashed currants to a stone jar and let them stand for two days, stirring well each day.

  3. Strain the mixture through cheesecloth.

Finish the syrup

  1. If desired, cook the strained juice with sugar like red currant syrup.

  2. The juice can also be bottled without sugar and will keep for years.

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. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants
Provide the juice and the tart, deep fruit flavour that the syrup is built on.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body to the syrup when it is cooked with the juice.

The step that matters

Standing the mashed currants for two days. Letting the mashed fruit stand and stirring it daily allows the juice to release from the pulp, so straining yields more liquid. Keeping the mixture covered and clean matters because it sits at room temperature for a long time.

“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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