Name: Raspberry and Currant Wine
Ingredients: 4 quarts currants; 1 quart raspberries; 1 quart water (for raspberries); 1 quart water (for currants); 1 pound sugar per quart of liquid

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 ↓

Raspberry and Currant Wine

Ingredients

4 quarts currants
1 quart raspberries
1 quart water (for raspberries)
1 quart water (for currants)
1 pound sugar per quart of liquid

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Mash and squeeze the currants, breaking any that remain whole.
Pour 1 quart of water over the currants and let it stand overnight.
Strain the mixture through a coarse sieve to remove seeds.

Make the wine

Measure the liquid and add 1 pound of sugar for each quart.
For every 4 quarts of currants, add 1 quart of mashed raspberries mixed with 1 pint of water.
Bottle the wine and let it age for at least a year for the best flavor.

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 main fruit flavor, acidity and juice for the wine.
Raspberries: Add aroma and fruity flavor to the currant base.
Sugar: Feeds the fermentation and sets the final sweetness and alcohol level.

“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.