Name: The Bombkeeper, Currant-pie
Ingredients: 1½ cups picked and washed currants; ¾ to 1 cup sugar; ¼ teaspoon salt

Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

The Bombkeeper, Currant-pie

Ingredients

1½ cups picked and washed currants
¾ to 1 cup sugar
¼ teaspoon salt

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
Mix the currants, sugar, and salt together.

Bake

Pour the mixture into a pie crust.
Bake with or without a cover until the filling is bubbly.

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.

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

Currants: Provide the tart fruit that forms the bulk of the filling and its flavor.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart currants and helps form a syrupy filling as it dissolves.

“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.