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Dessert

Currant Water Ice

A frozen dessert made from currant juice, lemon juice, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Currant Water Ice

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Juice the red currants and strain the juice.

  2. Mix the currant juice with lemon juice, water, and clarified sugar.

  3. Add food coloring if desired.

  4. Freeze the mixture until solid.

  5. If using, add raspberries to enhance the flavor before freezing.

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. Red currant + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Red currants
Provides the main fruit flavor, tartness and color of the ice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.
Clarified sugar
Sweetens the mix and lowers its freezing point, keeping the ice softer.

The step that matters

Balancing sweetness and acidity. Sugar and lemon juice must balance so the ice tastes bright rather than sour or cloying. Sugar also lowers the freezing point, so an under-sweetened mixture freezes harder and tastes flatter.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, 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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