Why it works: Currant and spirit work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34 recipes. The science ↓
Currant Wmes
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the juice
Bruise the currants well.
In a tub, combine the currants with the cold water and let it stand for 24 hours to ferment.
Strain the mixture through a hair sieve without hastening the process.
Sweeten and ferment
To every gallon of juice, add 2.5 pounds of lump sugar and stir well.
Transfer the mixture into a cask and add 1 quart of rectified spirits for every 6 gallons.
Let it stand for several weeks, and if clear, bottle it.
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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Currant + spirittop 21% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together34 recipes
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Sugar + spirittop 25% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together602 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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 natural sugars that the wine is made from.
- Lump sugar
- Sweetens the juice and feeds the fermentation that produces alcohol.
- Rectified spirits
- Added to the cask to raise the alcohol content and help keep the wine stable.
The step that matters
Strain without hastening the process. Fermentation is driven by yeast acting on sugar. Straining gently and leaving the mixture to work on its own time keeps the process steady and the flavour clean.
Swap the currant
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, spirit):
- Vanillafits better
- Orangefits better
- Applefits better
- Currantthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, spirit. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
“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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