Name: Currant Wine
Ingredients: 4 pounds currants; 4 pounds loaf sugar; water

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 Wine

1 gallon

Ingredients

4 pounds currants
4 pounds loaf sugar
water

Directions

Make the must

Juice the currants and dissolve the sugar in the juice.
Measure the mixture and add enough water to make 1 gallon.
Let it stand for 24 hours.

Bottle and store

Skim the surface, fill the jugs two-thirds full, and cork them.
Store in a cool place.
Bottle the wine in October.

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

Currants: Provide the juice and fruit flavour that forms the base of the wine.
Loaf sugar: Dissolves into the juice to provide sweetness and food for fermentation, producing alcohol.

“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.