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Black Currant Liqueur

A liqueur made by macerating black currants and leaves in wine spirits, then clarifying and sweetening with syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Spirit and wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 701 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Black Currant Liqueur

Ingredients

Directions

Steep

  1. Place black currants and leaves in a stone pan.

  2. Cover with spirits of wine and let sit for 6 weeks or longer.

Finish

  1. Squeeze the mixture through linen to extract the juice.

  2. Clarify the juice and add hot syrup made from lump sugar and water to taste.

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.

  1. Spirit + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together701 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Black currant + spirittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  3. Black currant + winetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  4. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Spirit + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants
Provide the main flavour and colour, and the juice that gives the liqueur its body.
Spirits of wine
Extract flavour from the fruit and leaves and preserve the liqueur.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the liqueur, balancing the tartness of the currants.
Black currant leaves
Add a grassy, aromatic note to the infusion.

The step that matters

Clarify the juice. Leftover pulp and sediment make the liqueur cloudy and can ferment or spoil it over time. Letting it settle and straining it carefully gives a clear, stable result.

Swap the black currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spirit, wine, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spirit, wine, sugar. 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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