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Dessert

Currant Ice

A frozen dessert made from currants, raspberries, lemon juice, and syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Currant Ice

Why it works: Currant and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,270 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Currant Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Strip currants from the stalks and combine with raspberries.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

Sweeten and freeze

  1. Add enough cold syrup to make the mixture sweet.

  2. Stir in the strained juice of the lemon(s).

  3. Freeze the mixture immediately.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

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

  2. Syrup + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Currant + syruptop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together329 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Currants
Provide the main tart fruit flavour and a deep colour.
Raspberries
Add fragrant sweetness and body to the fruit purée.
Cold syrup
Sugar adds sweetness and softens the frozen texture by lowering the freezing point.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the fruit and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Sweeten to taste before freezing. Sugar lowers the freezing point of the mixture, so it softens the ice and keeps it scoopable. Too little sugar makes the ice hard and icy, and the sweetness is hard to correct once frozen.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, lemon. 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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