Skip to main content
Dessert

Currant Water Ice

A frozen dessert made from currant juice, lemon juice, water, and clarified sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Red currant and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Currant Water Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Strain the red currants to extract the juice.

  2. Mix the currant juice, lemon juice, water, and clarified sugar in a bowl.

  3. Add food coloring if desired.

Freeze

  1. Pour the mixture into an ice cream maker or a shallow dish.

  2. Freeze until solid, stirring occasionally.

  3. If using, add raspberries to the mixture before freezing.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Provide the main tart fruit flavour and the juice that forms the base.
Clarified sugar
Sweetens the ice and lowers its freezing point so it stays softer.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the currant flavour.

The step that matters

Freeze until solid, stirring occasionally. Stirring breaks up ice crystals as they form, keeping the ice smooth and grainy-free rather than hard and icy. Sugar also lowers the freezing point, so the mixture needs time to set fully.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar. 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 ice recipes

Cream 29Water 7Red Cream 3 See all 34 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipes