Name: White and Red Currants
Ingredients: large fresh white currants; large fresh red currants; sugar

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 ↓

White and Red Currants

Ingredients

large fresh white currants
large fresh red currants
sugar

Directions

Pick large, fresh currants from the stems.
Place them in glass dishes, either together or separate.
Cover the currants thickly with sugar and let sit for 1 hour.
Serve with additional sugar in a glass bowl.
Enjoy with custard.

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.

White currant + red curranttop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together4 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).
Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,156 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together59 recipes