Name: Black Currant Tea
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons black currant jam; 1 quart water; 1 teaspoon arrowroot (optional)

Why it works: Black currant and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Black Currant Tea

Ingredients

2 tablespoons black currant jam
1 quart water
1 teaspoon arrowroot (optional)

Directions

Boil 2 tablespoons of black currant jam in 1 quart of water for 30 minutes.
Strain the mixture.
If desired, mix in 1 teaspoon of arrowroot and boil again.

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.

Black currant + arrowroottop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currant jam: Provides the fruit flavor and sweetness that give the tea its character.
Arrowroot: Thickens the liquid slightly when boiled, giving it a more body.

“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.