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Dessert

White Currant Jelly

A preserve made from white currants, sugar, and water, boiled until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and white currant work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. The science ↓

White Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Put the fruit into a preserving pan with ½ pint of water.

  2. Bruise the currants with your hands to extract the stalks.

  3. Stir the fruit on the fire until it begins to simmer.

  4. Pour the mixture into a hair sieve over a large pan or use a fruit presser to extract the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. Boil the sugar until it reaches the ball stage.

  2. Add the juice to the boiling sugar.

  3. Use an untinned copper skimmer to stir the jelly occasionally and remove any scum.

  4. Boil for about 15 minutes until the jelly reaches the right consistency.

Pot and store

  1. Pour the jelly into pots and let it set.

  2. Cover with brandied paper and store in a cool, dry place for a couple of days.

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. Sugar + white curranttop 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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, when boiled, the concentration needed for the jelly to set.
White currant juice
Supplies the fruit flavour and the natural pectin and acid that help the jelly set.
Water
Helps the fruit soften and release its juice before straining.

The step that matters

Boil the jelly to the right consistency. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar and pectin. Too short a boil leaves the jelly runny and it will not set; too long a boil can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

“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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