Name: Compote of Red Currants
Ingredients: 1 pint water; 5 to 6 ounces sugar; 1 pint red currants, stalks removed

Why it works: Sugar and red currant 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 ↓

Compote of Red Currants

Ingredients

1 pint water
5 to 6 ounces sugar
1 pint red currants, stalks removed

Directions

Make the syrup

Boil water and sugar together for 10 minutes to make a syrup.

Cook the currants

Simmer the red currants in the syrup for 5 to 7 minutes.

Serve

Serve as an accompaniment to pudding, custard, bread, rice, or on its own.

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.

Sugar + red curranttop 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 fruit and tartness that the compote is built around.
Sugar: Sweetens the syrup and balances the tartness of the currants.

“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.