Name: Currant Shrub
Ingredients: 1 quart currants; 1 quart water; sugar to taste; cracked ice

Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Currant Shrub

Ingredients

1 quart currants
1 quart water
sugar to taste
cracked ice

Directions

Make the shrub

Mash the currants to yield 1 quart of juice.
Strain the juice through a coarse sieve and then through a fine bag.
Add 1 quart of water and sugar to taste.
Strain again after the sugar is dissolved.

Serve

Serve with cracked ice.

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.

Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Currants: Provide the main juice and the tart, fruity acidity that defines the shrub.
Sugar: Balances the tartness of the currant juice and rounds out the drink's sweetness.

“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.