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Dessert

Glazed Currants

A sweet treat of currants coated in egg whites and powdered sugar, then dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Glazed Currants

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the currants by dipping them in a bowl of cold water and drain them dry.

  2. Beat the egg whites lightly, just enough to break them.

Glaze and dry

  1. Dip the currants in the egg whites and place them on a sieve without touching each other.

  2. Sift powdered sugar over the currants and place them in a warm place to dry.

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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Currant + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. 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 fresh fruit that is coated and dried into a glossy, crisp-looking confection.
Egg whites
Form a thin coating that binds the powdered sugar to the fruit surface.
Powdered sugar
Forms a dry, sweet, glossy shell over the egg white coating as it dries.

The step that matters

Dip the currants in the egg whites and place them on a sieve without touching each other.. Beaten egg whites should be only lightly broken so they coat evenly rather than turning frothy and thick. Spacing the currants keeps each one separately coated, so they dry without sticking together.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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