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Currant Shrub

A sweetened currant syrup made by extracting juice, adding sugar, diluting with ice and water, and garnishing with nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and nutmeg work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 67 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Currant Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Extract the juice from the red currants.

Sweeten and dilute

  1. Add 1 cup of sugar for each pint of juice, then mix well.

  2. Dilute the mixture with twice as much crushed ice and water as there is currant juice.

Serve

  1. Grate a small amount of nutmeg into each glass before serving.

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 + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together67 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 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

Red currants
Supply the tart juice that gives the shrub its main sharp, fruity flavor.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the tart juice and balances its acidity.
Crushed ice
Chills the drink and, with the water, dilutes the concentrated juice mixture.

The step that matters

Mix well after adding the sugar. Sugar must fully dissolve into the juice. Undissolved crystals leave a grainy texture and uneven sweetness, so stir until no sugar remains visible before diluting.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, nutmeg. 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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