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Dessert

Currant Cakes

A sweet cake made from currants, water, and sugar, boiled and dried.

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 Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick and wash the currants.

  2. Boil the currants in 1 pint of water.

  3. Strain the juice through a jelly bag without pressing it.

Make and dry the cakes

  1. Boil the juice and add 3 pounds of sugar for every quart of juice.

  2. Pour the mixture into glasses and let it dry in a stone until it can be turned out.

  3. Dry the cakes on plates.

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

Currants
Provide the fruit flavour and the natural pectin that helps the juice set into a firm cake.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and, once boiled down, helps it set firm and keep its shape.
Water
Helps extract the juice from the currants during the initial boil.

The step that matters

Strain without pressing the jelly bag. Squeezing the bag forces cloudy pulp and fine solids through, which can make the juice murky and affect how cleanly the cakes set.

“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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