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Dessert

Black Currant Paste

Paste made from black currants and sugar, cooked until thick and dry, then spread and dried into lozenges.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the currants

  1. Put ripe black currants in an earthenware pan or jar and heat in the oven until soft.

  2. Rub the currants through a matted sieve to remove stalks.

  3. Warm the strained currants in a small preserving pan.

  4. Rub the strained currants through a fine hair sieve to remove skins and seeds.

Cook the paste

  1. Weigh the strained currants; if it is 5 pounds, add ½ pound of sugar.

  2. Stir the currants in a preserving pan over a brisk fire until thick and dry, about 30 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the sugar after bubbling stops.

Dry and shape

  1. Spread the mixture on tin or pewter plates about ¼ inch thick.

  2. Dry in the stove or under the oven until it peels off like leather.

  3. Cut into lozenges or small diamonds, or drop onto plates in small drops.

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 pulp, pectin and acidity that thicken and set the paste.
Sugar
Sweetens the paste and helps it set firm and keep as moisture evaporates.

The step that matters

Stirring until thick and dry. Stirring constantly over a brisk fire prevents the concentrated fruit and sugar from scorching on the base of the pan. The paste must be cooked until it is thick enough to hold its shape, because water left in it will stop it drying properly and setting firm.

“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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