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White Currant Cordial

A sweet alcoholic cordial made from white currants, whiskey, lemon, sugar, ginger, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

White Currant Cordial

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse

  1. Combine bruised white currants and whiskey in a jar.

  2. Add the thinly pared lemon rind and let it stand for 2 days.

Finish and bottle

  1. Strain or filter the mixture.

  2. Stir in leaf sugar, ginger, and lemon juice until dissolved.

  3. Bottle and seal the cordial.

  4. Let it sit for at least 1 month before using; it improves with age.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. White currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

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

  5. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

White currants
Provide the fruit flavor and tartness that the cordial is built around.
Whiskey
Extracts flavor from the fruit and rind and preserves the finished cordial.
Leaf sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the currants and lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sugar.

The step that matters

Stir in the sugar until fully dissolved. Undissolved sugar settles and leaves the cordial unevenly sweet and gritty. Stirring the sugar into the alcohol-based mixture until it dissolves gives an even sweetness throughout.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, ginger. 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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