Skip to main content
Dessert

Red Currant Ice

A chilled fruit ice made from currants and raspberries sweetened with syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Currant and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,270 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Red Currant Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Strip the currants from the stalks.

  2. Rub the currants and raspberries through a fine sieve.

Sweeten and flavor

  1. Mix the fruit puree with enough cold syrup to make it sweet.

  2. Add lemon juice if desired for extra flavor.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture using the ice and salt method described.

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 + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Syrup + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Currant + syruptop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together329 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the main tart fruit flavor and the bright red color of the ice.
Raspberries
Add extra fruit aroma and body to the puree.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point so the ice stays soft rather than rock hard.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that sharpens the fruit flavor.

The step that matters

Sweeten the puree enough before freezing. Sugar lowers the freezing point of the mixture. Under-sweetened puree freezes harder and tastes flat, while adequate sugar keeps the ice scoopable and lets the fruit flavor come through.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (currant, syrup):

  1. Red currantfits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against currant, syrup. 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.

More red currant ice recipes

Cream 3 See all 2 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipes