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Drink

Winter Drink

A winter drink made by simmering black currants, sweetening with sugar, and adding gin or rum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and gin work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 344 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Winter Drink

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Place a jar of black currants in a saucepan of boiling water.

  2. Let it simmer until all the juice is extracted.

  3. Strain the juice into a saucepan.

Sweeten and bottle

  1. Add 8 oz of sugar for each pint of juice and bring to a boil.

  2. Skim the mixture well and let it cool.

  3. Mix in an equal amount of gin or rum.

  4. Pour into a bottle and use as needed.

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. Sugar + gintop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together344 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

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

  3. Black currant + gintop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants
Provide the main fruit flavour and deep colour of the infusion.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances the currants' natural tartness.
Gin or rum
Alcohol that preserves the infusion and carries the fruit aroma.

The step that matters

Mix in the gin or rum only after the mixture has cooled. Alcohol evaporates and loses its aroma when heated, so adding it to hot liquid wastes its flavour and weakens the preserving effect.

Swap the black currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, gin. 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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