Why it works: Black currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓
Black Currant Jsllt
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the juice
Gather the black currants on a dry day and remove them from the stalks.
Place the currants and water in a preserving pan and bruise the currants until they scald.
Pour the mixture into a fine sieve and press out all the juice with your hands.
Strain the juice through a piece of muslin.
Make the jelly
For each pint of juice, add 1 pound of finely broken loaf sugar to the preserving pan.
Stir the mixture until it boils, then let it boil for 3 minutes and skim off any foam.
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.
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Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together393 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Black currants
- Provide the fruit flavour and natural pectin that lets the juice set into jelly.
- Fine loaf sugar
- Sweetens the jelly and helps it set firm when boiled with the juice.
The step that matters
Boiling after adding the sugar. Sugar must dissolve fully before the mixture boils, and the boil must be kept up for the stated time. Too short a boil leaves the jelly runny, while overcooking can make it stiff or dull in flavour as the pectin and sugar concentrate.
“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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