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Dessert

Red Currants

Currants preserved by steeping in sugar, then sealed in bottles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

Red Currants

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sprinkle the sugar among the currants.

  2. Place the currants in bottles and cork them lightly.

Heat and cool

  1. Set the bottles in a pan of cold water on a slow fire until the water is scalding.

  2. Maintain the water at that temperature for 20 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and let the bottles sit in the water until cold.

Seal and store

  1. Cork the bottles tightly and seal or tie down the corks.

  2. Store in a dry, cool place.

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. 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 and juice that fills the preserved bottles.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by drawing out moisture and inhibiting spoilage.

The step that matters

Keeping the water at scalding for 20 minutes. Holding the bottles at a steady scalding temperature heats the fruit through so it is preserved. Too cool and the fruit may spoil; too hot and it may boil over or break down.

“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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