Name: Currant Wine
Ingredients: 2 quarts currant juice; 1 quart water; 3.5 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

2 quarts currant juice
1 quart water
3.5 pounds sugar

Directions

Prepare the juice

Press the currants to extract the juice.

Ferment

Add 1 quart of water and 3.5 pounds of sugar to the currant juice.
Let the mixture stand in a large jar until fermentation stops.

Bottle

Carefully draw off the liquid.
Bottle and cork it securely.

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

Currant juice: Provides the main fruit flavor, acidity, and the sugar-fermenting base for the wine.
Sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Water: Dilutes the juice to balance acidity and sweetness before fermentation.

“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.