Name: Currant Water
Ingredients: 1 pound ripe red currants; ½ pound lump sugar; ½ pound castor sugar; 3 pints water

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 Water

Ingredients

1 pound ripe red currants
½ pound lump sugar
½ pound castor sugar
3 pints water

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Stalk and pick over the currants.
Mash the currants with a wooden spoon, adding ½ pint of water as you mash.
Put the mashed fruit into a preserving pan with the castor sugar.
Stir over the fire until it begins to simmer, then pass through a fine sieve.

Make the syrup

In a separate pan, dissolve the lump sugar in 3 cups of boiling water, then boil to a syrup.
Pour the syrup onto the fruit juice, adding 1½ pints more water.

Serve

Serve cold.

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 the main fruit flavour, tartness and colour of the drink.
Lump sugar: Dissolved in boiling water to make a syrup that sweetens the drink.
Castor sugar: Sweetens the fruit as it heats, and its fine grains dissolve readily.

“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.