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 Lozenges
Ingredients
Directions
Make the juice
Put the black currants into a preserving pan and bruise them with your hand until soft.
Squeeze the bruised currants through a sieve to extract the juice.
Cook and dry
For every pint of juice, add 4 ounces of brown sugar and boil while stirring for 45 minutes.
Pour the mixture thinly over saucers or small plates and dry it for three days near a fire.
Cut the dried mixture into small dice or lozenges as needed.
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.
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Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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 fruit flavour, acidity and natural pectin that help the mixture set into a firm sheet.
- Brown sugar
- Adds sweetness and thickens the reduced juice into a chewy, sliceable confection as it cooks.
The step that matters
Boiling with sugar while stirring. The juice must cook long enough for the sugar to concentrate and the mixture to thicken. Stirring prevents scorching on the base of the pan, which would give a burnt flavour, and undercooking leaves the lozenges sticky and unable to hold their shape when dried.
“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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