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Currant Shrub

A preserved fruit vinegar made by steeping currant juice with sugar and rum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and rum work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 155 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Currant Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Make the shrub

  1. Dissolve the sugar in the currant juice.

  2. Stir in the rum and seal the vessel tightly.

  3. Let it sit overnight.

Filter and bottle

  1. The next day, filter the mixture through blotting paper.

  2. Pour the shrub into clean, dry bottles and cork them well.

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 + rumtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together155 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. 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

Currant juice
Provides the tart, fruity base that the sugar and rum balance.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and counters its sourness.
Old jamaica rum
Acts as a preservative and carries the spirit's aroma into the shrub.

The step that matters

Seal the vessel tightly. A tight seal keeps alcohol from evaporating and stops air from reaching the juice, which helps the shrub keep its flavour and avoid spoilage while the sugar dissolves and the flavours blend overnight.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, rum):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, rum. 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.

More currant shrub recipes

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