Why it works: Currant and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,057 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓
Currant Wine
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the juice
Gather ripe currants on a dry day and strip them from the stalks.
Put the currants into a large pan and bruise them with a pestle.
Let the mixture sit for 24 hours to ferment.
Run the liquor through a hair sieve without touching it with your hands.
Make the wine
Add 5 pounds of sugar for every gallon of liquor and stir well.
For every 6 gallons, add 1 quart of brandy and transfer to a vessel.
Let it stand for 6 weeks.
Bottle
If it is clear, bottle it.
If it is not clear, draw it off into another vessel and let it sit for another 2 weeks before bottling.
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.
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Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,057 recipes
Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
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Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together11,939 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together12,256 recipes
Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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 fruit, juice and natural sugars that ferment into the wine.
- White sugar
- Feeds the fermentation and adds sweetness and body to the finished wine.
- Brandy
- Fortifies the wine, raising its alcohol content and helping preserve it.
The step that matters
Run the liquor through a hair sieve without touching it with your hands. Keeping hands off the strained liquor limits contamination by unwanted microbes that could spoil the wine during fermentation.
Swap the currant
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, brandy):
- Vanillafits better
- Apricotfits better
- Raisinfits better
- Currantthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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