Name: To Preserve the Pulp of Black Currants
Ingredients: 12 pounds very ripe black currants; 1 quart water; 4 ounces pounded sugar per pound of pulp

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 ↓

To Preserve the Pulp of Black Currants

Ingredients

12 pounds very ripe black currants
1 quart water
4 ounces pounded sugar per pound of pulp

Directions

Prepare the pulp

Crush black currants with water in a copper preserving pan.
Boil while stirring until well mixed.
Press out all the pulp.
Pour pulp into an earthen pan.

Sweeten and bottle

Add 4 ounces of sugar for each pound of pulp and mix thoroughly.
Fill bottles, cork, and tie down with wire.

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.

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 that forms the body and flavor of the preserve.
Pounded sugar: Sweetens the pulp and helps preserve it by binding water and inhibiting spoilage.

“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.