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Black Currant Marmalade

A preserve made from black currants, sugar, and water.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pulp

  1. Pick the currants clean from the stalks.

  2. Place them in a pot with a little water and cook until mashed.

  3. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve to extract the pulp.

  4. Weigh the pulp and return it to the pot.

  5. Reduce the pulp over heat until it is halved in volume.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add 12 oz of loaf sugar, clarify it, and boil until it reaches a crack stage.

  2. Mix the sugar with the pulp and boil until it thickens to a jelly consistency.

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. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked 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 pulp and the tart flavour that defines the marmalade.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the pulp and, as it cooks down, helps set the mixture into a jelly.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar and pulp to a jelly consistency. Sugar and pectin-rich fruit set only when enough water evaporates and the sugar concentration rises. Stopping too early leaves a runny preserve, while boiling too long can make it stiff or cause scorching.

“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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