Name: Currant Wine
Ingredients: currants; cold water; 3 pounds sugar

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

Ingredients

currants
cold water
3 pounds sugar

Directions

Prepare the juice

Wash the currants and squeeze out the juice.
Add cold water equal to the amount of juice and let it stand overnight.
Strain the mixture.
Pour the liquid back into the juice.

Sweeten and store

Add 3 pounds of sugar for every gallon of the mixture.
Set in a cool place and bottle in February.

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 the fruit flavour that defines the wine.
Sugar: Feeds fermentation and adds sweetness that balances the currants' tartness.

“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.