Name: Currant Jelly
Ingredients: ½ bushel currants; 1 pound crushed or granulated sugar (for the first recipe); ¾ pound crushed or granulated sugar (for the second recipe)

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 Jelly

Ingredients

½ bushel currants
1 pound crushed or granulated sugar (for the first recipe)
¾ pound crushed or granulated sugar (for the second recipe)

Directions

Extract the juice

Heat the currants in a kettle until they look shriveled, scalding thoroughly but not boiling.
Pour the contents into a large flannel bag and drain without touching.

Make the jelly

Add 1 pound of sugar to every pint of juice.
Boil the juice for 15 minutes without sugar.
Add sugar and boil for an additional 5 minutes. Skim well.
Pour into glasses.
Add ¾ pound of sugar to every pint of juice.
Boil for 20 minutes. Skim.
Pour into glasses.

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 juice that sets into the jelly and supplies its tart flavor.
Sugar: Sweetens the jelly and helps it set by binding water and concentrating the pectin.

“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.