Name: Black Currant
Ingredients: 2 pounds black currants; 4 ounces sugar; Pastry for covering

Why it works: Black currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Black Currant

Ingredients

2 pounds black currants
4 ounces sugar
Pastry for covering

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

Strip and cut off the stems from the black currants.
Stew the currants with the sugar until softened.

Assemble and bake

Place the mixture in a dish and cover with pastry.
Bake at 400°F (200°C) until the pastry is golden.
Serve warm.

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.

Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together393 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants: Provide the tart fruit that forms the main filling of the pie.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart currants and helps them soften into a stewed filling.
Pastry: Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the crust.

“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.