Name: Currant Juice
Ingredients: 4 cups currant juice; 1 tablespoon currant jelly; 1 cup cold water (or hot water if jelly is used); Sugar to taste

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 Juice

Ingredients

4 cups currant juice
1 tablespoon currant jelly
1 cup cold water (or hot water if jelly is used)
Sugar to taste

Directions

Mix the currant juice or jelly with the water.
Add sugar to sweeten according to your taste.

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

Currant juice: Provides the main liquid and the tart, fruity flavour of the drink.
Currant jelly: Adds body and extra fruit flavour, since its pectin lends a slightly thicker mouthfeel.
Sugar: Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the currants.

“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.