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Dessert

Canned Fruit, Jelly, and Preserves

A preserved fruit jelly made by boiling currants and raspberries with sugar and canning the mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Canned Fruit, Jelly, and Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scald glass jars and tumblers with hot water and prepare elastics and tops.

  2. Weigh your kettle empty, then weigh it again with fruit to determine the amount used.

  3. Pick currants and raspberries, stem the currants, and place both in a kettle.

  4. Boil the fruit until soft, breaking it with a spoon.

  5. Squeeze the mixture through a crash bag, rinsing the bag after each use.

Make the jelly

  1. For every pint of juice, measure out 1 pound of sugar and heat it in shallow dishes or the oven.

  2. Return the juice to a clean kettle and skim off any foam as it heats.

  3. After boiling the juice for 20 minutes, quickly stir in the hot sugar until it melts.

  4. Remove from heat just before it begins to boil.

  5. Fill jars or tumblers with the hot mixture and seal.

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 natural pectin and tartness that help the preserve set.
Raspberries
Add flavor and aroma and contribute to the fruit body of the preserve.
White sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, at high concentration, helps it gel and keep.

The step that matters

Adding the hot sugar and stopping the boil. Sugar must be heated before it is stirred in so the mixture does not cool and stall, and it dissolves quickly. Removing the pan just before a full boil avoids over-cooking, which darkens the flavor and can weaken the set.

“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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