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Dessert

To Bottle Red Currants

A method of preserving red currants by layering them with sugar in bottles and sealing with resin.

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 ↓

To Bottle Red Currants

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and fill

  1. Gut the red currants carefully from the stalks into clean, dry quart bottles.

  2. Add 2 teaspoons of finely pounded white sugar to each layer of fruit.

  3. Fill the bottles, letting the last layer be sugar.

Seal and store

  1. Seal the corks with resin and store the bottles neck down in a bottle rack.

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

Red currants
Provide the main fruit, whose juice and flesh are preserved in the bottles.
Finely pounded white sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by drawing out moisture and limiting spoilage.

The step that matters

Filling the bottles with sugar layers. Sugar must be spread evenly between layers so the fruit is well covered. Sugar draws water out of the fruit and slows microbial growth, so gaps or dry layers leave parts of the fruit less protected.

“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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