Why it works: Black currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓
A Fine Black Currant Wine to Imitate Constants
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the juice
Squeeze the currants lightly and pour the water over them.
Boil the mixture in a copper for 10 minutes, then draw off and strain.
Press the berries again and add more water to the husks to extract remaining juice, then strain into the first liquor.
Make the wine
Add 2.5 pounds of sugar and 1 ounce of crude tartar to the mixture.
When the liquor is at 85°F (29°C), add ¼ pint of fresh yeast for every 5 gallons.
The longer it is kept in the cask before bottling, the better.
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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Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together393 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Black currants
- Provide the main fruit flavour, colour and acidity for the wine.
- Loaf sugar
- Supplies the sugar that yeast converts to alcohol during fermentation.
- Crude tartar
- Adds acidity and helps keep the wine stable and bright.
- Fresh yeast
- Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
The step that matters
Adding yeast at the right temperature. Yeast works poorly when the liquor is too hot and can die, while a cooler liquor ferments slowly. Checking the temperature before pitching the yeast helps fermentation start reliably.
“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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