Name: Currant Wine
Ingredients: ripe currants; 10 pounds granulated sugar; well-water

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

ripe currants
10 pounds granulated sugar
well-water

Directions

Prepare the juice

Remove currants from stems, mash and squeeze out all the juice using your hands.

Make the must

For every gallon of juice, dissolve 10 pounds of sugar in well-water.
Fill the cask with well-water after adding the juice and sugar.
Cover the bung-hole with thin cloth or perforated tin during fermentation.

Age

This wine will be ready in one year; the older it is, the better.

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

Ripe currants: Provide the juice, flavour and acidity that give the wine its character.
Granulated sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and 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.