Name: Currants and Huckleberries
Ingredients: 2 cups red currants; 2 cups huckleberries; ½ cup sugar; milk or cream for serving

Why it works: Red currant and milk work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 193 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Currants and Huckleberries

Ingredients

2 cups red currants
2 cups huckleberries
½ cup sugar
milk or cream for serving

Directions

Prepare

Mix red currants and huckleberries in a bowl.
Sprinkle sugar over the fruit and let it sit for 30 minutes.

Serve

Serve with milk or cream.

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.

Red currant + milktop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together193 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).
Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together77,875 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Red currants: Provide the tart, acidic flavor that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Huckleberries: Add juicy body and a deeper, sweet-tart berry flavor to the mixture.
Sugar: Sweetens the fruit and draws out juice as it sits, forming a syrup.