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Dessert

Candied or Frosted Currants

A sweet treat made by boiling currants in sugar syrup, dipping in brandy, and drying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,057 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Candied or Frosted Currants

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a skillet, combine the loaf sugar and water; bring to a boil and skim off any foam.

  2. Boil the mixture rapidly for 30 minutes.

Coat and dry

  1. Dip each bunch of currants twice into the brandy, then into the hot syrup.

  2. Dust the currants with additional loaf sugar after the second dip.

  3. Place the currants on a sieve in a warm, dry place or in the sun until dry.

  4. Store the dried currants in a paper box.

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 + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Loaf sugar
Forms a syrup that coats the currants and dries into a crisp, sweet shell.
Fine ripe currants
Provide the fruit that is preserved and candied by the syrup coating.
Brandy
Adds aroma and helps the syrup coating adhere to the fruit before drying.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup rapidly for 30 minutes. Boiling sugar and water concentrates the syrup so it sets into a hard coating as it dries. Too little boiling leaves a syrup that stays sticky and may not preserve the fruit well.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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