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Sweet Pickled Fruits, Etc

A preserve made by simmering currants with sugar to form a sweet pickled fruit jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

Sweet Pickled Fruits, Etc

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the currants

  1. Crush a quantity of currants.

  2. Simmer over low flame to extract juice.

  3. Drip the juice through a clean bag.

  4. Measure the juice.

  5. Seed or strip the currants from the stems.

Cook the juice with sugar

  1. Use equal amounts of sugar and prepared currants.

  2. Cook the juice for 10 minutes.

  3. Add half of the sugar.

  4. Cook for 5 minutes.

  5. Add the whole currants.

  6. Cook for another 5 minutes.

  7. Add the remaining sugar.

Test and pour

  1. Test for jelling as soon as it dissolves.

  2. Pour into small glasses like jelly.

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. 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 and natural pectin that help the mixture set like jelly.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the juice thicken and set as it cooks.

The step that matters

Test for jelling as soon as the sugar dissolves. Sugar and pectin set only within a narrow range of cooking. Overcooking can make the mixture stiff, while undercooking leaves it runny, so testing early helps you stop at the right point.

“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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