Skip to main content
Dessert

Currants in Bunches

A sweet jelly made by boiling currants with clarified sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: White currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. The science ↓

Currants in Bunches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the currants

  1. Open the currants on one side and remove the seeds with a needle.

  2. Tie the currants together by the stalk with red thread to form bunches.

  3. Weigh the bunches; for every pound of fruit, use 1.5 pounds of clarified sugar.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar to a great pearl stage.

  2. Add the currant bunches to the boiling syrup and cook well.

Skim

  1. Remove from heat, let stand for five minutes, and skim the syrup.

  2. Repeat the skimming process twice more until the syrup resembles currant 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. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Currants
Supply the fruit flavour, tartness and natural pectin that help the jelly set.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and, when boiled to concentration, helps the syrup thicken and set as it cools.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar to the great pearl stage. The syrup must reach the right concentration before the fruit is added. Too little boiling leaves the jelly runny and unable to set, while overboiling makes it stiff and sugary.

“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.

More currant jelly recipes

Red 93Black 55Sauce 50White 38French 11Tartlets 7 See all 365 →

You might also like

Currant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes