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Drink

Fine Currant Syrup, or Strop De Groseilles

A syrup made by extracting juice from ripe red currants, allowing it to curdle, sweetening with sugar, and boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Fine Currant Syrup, or Strop De Groseilles

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Express the juice from ripe red currants and strain it into a clean pitcher.

  2. Let it stand in a cool place for 24 hours or longer until it curdles.

  3. Pour the juice into a fine sieve and drain without pressure.

  4. Pass it through a jelly bag.

Make the syrup

  1. Add an equal weight of finely broken sugar to the juice and dissolve it.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a preserving pan and boil gently for 4 to 5 minutes, removing scum as it rises.

Bottle and store

  1. After 12 hours, pour the syrup into small dry bottles, cork them, and store in a cool, dry 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. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe red currants
Provide the juice that forms the base and gives the syrup its flavour and colour.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and, once dissolved and boiled, helps thicken and preserve the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the sweetened juice. Boiling gently for only 4 to 5 minutes while skimming scum keeps the syrup clear and fresh-tasting; boiling too long can darken and dull the flavour.

“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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