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Currant Shrub

A sweetened alcoholic beverage made with rum or brandy, currant juice, orange rind, nutmeg, white wine, and loaf sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rum and white wine match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 113 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Currant Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the rum or brandy with the currant juice, orange rind, and nutmeg.

  2. Cork the mixture well and let it stand for 1–2 days.

  3. Add the white wine and loaf sugar, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

  4. Strain the mixture through a flannel bag and bottle it for use.

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. Rum + white winetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together113 recipes

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

  2. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Rum + nutmegtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together646 recipes

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

  4. Rum + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together801 recipes

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

  5. Orange + white winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together730 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rum or brandy
Provides alcohol that extracts and preserves the fruit and orange flavours.
Red or white currant juice
Supplies the tart fruit flavour that gives the shrub its character.
Seville orange rind
Adds aromatic oils and a bitter citrus note to the spirit.
White wine
Adds liquid and a light, fresh body to the blend.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the shrub and balances the currant tartness.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand before adding the wine and sugar. Steeping lets the alcohol draw flavour and aroma out of the currant juice and orange rind. Adding the wine and sugar too early can dilute that extraction and leave the flavour flatter.

Swap the white currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rum, orange, nutmeg, white wine, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rum, orange, nutmeg, white wine, 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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