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Currant Shrub

A sweetened fruit vinegar made from raspberries and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Squeeze the raspberries and currants through a cheesecloth bag.

  2. Combine the juices in a pot and bring to a boil.

  3. Skim off any foam.

Sweeten and bottle

  1. Add ½ pound of sugar for every pint of juice.

  2. Boil for about 5 minutes.

  3. Bottle the mixture immediately.

  4. Cork and seal with wax if not using a patent stopper.

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.

  1. 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

Red raspberries
Provides the main fruit flavor and most of the juice.
Currants
Adds tart acidity and a deeper fruit flavor.
Sugar
Balances the sharp acidity of the fruit and adds sweetness to the syrup.

The step that matters

Bottle immediately and seal well. The syrup should go into bottles while still hot and be sealed airtight. Hot filling and a tight seal limit microbial contamination, which would otherwise spoil the shrub during storage.

“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.

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