Name: Currant Wine
Ingredients: 1 gallon currant juice; ½ gallon water; 5 pounds brown sugar

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 Wine

Ingredients

1 gallon currant juice
½ gallon water
5 pounds brown sugar

Directions

Prepare the juice

Wash the currants well and add a little water.
Strain the mixture through a sieve.
Combine 1 gallon of currant juice with ½ gallon of water.
Add 5 pounds of brown sugar to the mixture.

Ferment and seal

Place the mixture in a cask and leave it open for 4 days.
After 4 days, cork the cask tightly.

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

Currant juice: Provides the fruit flavor and the base liquid that the wine is made from.
Brown sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation, which turns sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

“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.