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Prepare the Syrup

A syrup made by boiling sugar with currant juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and currant 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 ↓

Prepare the Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Bruise and squeeze the currants through a cloth strainer to extract the juice.

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve the sugar in a saucepan with the currant juice.

  2. Boil the mixture until it reaches a syrup consistency.

  3. Dissolve the sugar in ½ cup of water.

  4. Boil for a few minutes.

  5. Add the currant juice.

  6. Boil again.

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 + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant 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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, when concentrated by boiling, the thick body of the syrup.
Currant juice
Supplies the fruit flavour and tartness that give the syrup its character.

The step that matters

Boil until the syrup reaches syrup consistency. Boiling evaporates water so the sugar concentrates. Too little boiling leaves the syrup thin, while too much makes it overly thick and prone to crystallising as it cools.

“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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