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Drink

White Currant Shrub

A sweetened fruit drink made from white currant juice, rum, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rum and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,908 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

White Currant Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Strip the fruit and prepare it in a jar as for jelly.

  2. Strain the juice.

Make the shrub

  1. Combine the juice with the rum and sugar.

  2. Strain the mixture through a jelly bag until clear.

  3. Bottle the shrub.

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. Rum + sugartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. White currant + rumtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

White currant juice
Provides the main fruit flavour and tartness that gives the shrub its character.
Rum
Acts as a preservative and carries the fruit aroma while keeping the drink stable.
Lump sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the currant juice.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture through a jelly bag until clear. Straining slowly through a jelly bag removes fine solids that would otherwise cloud the shrub and cause sediment to form in the bottle. Rushing this step leaves the drink murky.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rum, 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.

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