Name: Currant and Raspberry
Ingredients: 2 cups red currants; 2 cups raspberries; ½ cup sugar; pastry for covering

Why it works: Red currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Currant and Raspberry

Ingredients

2 cups red currants
2 cups raspberries
½ cup sugar
pastry for covering

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).
Arrange equal proportions of red currants and raspberries to fill a dish.
Sprinkle ½ cup of sugar over the fruit.
Cover the dish with pastry.

Bake and serve

Bake until golden and serve warm.

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.

Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants: Provide tart acidity and the main fruit body that softens and thickens as it bakes.
Raspberries: Add aroma and fruity flavour, balancing the sharpness of the red currants.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart and draws juice from the fruit, helping form a syrup.
Pastry: Forms the covering that bakes to a golden, crisp layer over the fruit.

“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.