Name: Currant Water
Ingredients: 1 pound ripe red currants; ½ pound lump sugar; ½ pound castor sugar; 3½ pints water

Why it works: Red currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Currant Water

Ingredients

1 pound ripe red currants
½ pound lump sugar
½ pound castor sugar
3½ pints water

Directions

Make the juice

Stalk and pick over the currants, then mash them with a wooden spoon, adding ½ pint of water as you mash.
Put the mashed currants in a preserving pan with the castor sugar and stir over heat until it begins to simmer.
Pass the mixture through a fine sieve.

Sweeten and serve

In a separate pan, dissolve the lump sugar in 3 cups of boiling water and boil it to a syrup.
Pour the syrup onto the fruit juice and add 1½ pints more water.
Serve cold.

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 + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Red currants: Provide the main juice and the tart, sharp flavour of the drink.
Lump sugar: Dissolves into boiling water to form a syrup that sweetens the drink.
Castor sugar: Dissolves easily into the warm fruit, adding sweetness to the juice.

“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.