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Black Currant Jelly

A jelly made from black currants, red currant juice, and lump sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and red currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 72 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Black Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the juice

  1. Place black currants on their stalks in a brown earthen pan or jar and cover them.

  2. Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven until soft.

  3. Rub the baked currants through a matted sieve.

  4. Then rub the mixture through a fine hair sieve to remove small seeds.

Make the jelly

  1. For every pint of juice, add one pint of red currant juice.

  2. Add one pound of broken lump sugar for each pint of mixed juice.

  3. Boil and finish the jelly as you would red 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. Black currant + red curranttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together72 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants
Provide the main flavour and the pectin-rich pulp that gives the jelly its body.
Red currant juice
Adds extra acidity and pectin, helping the jelly set firmly.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it set.

The step that matters

Boiling the jelly. Jelly sets only when enough sugar, acid and pectin are concentrated together. Boiling too briefly leaves it runny, while boiling too long can darken and dull the flavour. Watch for the set rather than relying on time.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (black currant, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Red currantthe original
  3. Blueberryfits less well
  4. Raspberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against black currant, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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