Name: Currant Wine From Unripe Fruit
Ingredients: 1 lb unripe currants; equal quantity of water; equal quantity of sugar

Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Currant Wine From Unripe Fruit

Ingredients

1 lb unripe currants
equal quantity of water
equal quantity of sugar

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Remove the stalks from the currants.
Mash the berries in an earthenware crock using a wooden spoon or pestle.
Pour an equal quantity of water over the mashed fruit.

Ferment

Add the same amount of sugar as water.
Strain the mixture well before transferring it to a cask.
Set aside to ferment.

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.

Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants: Provide the fruit flavour, acidity and the natural sugars and yeasts that drive fermentation.
Sugar: Feeds the yeast, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.

“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.