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To Make Red Currant Jelly

A preserved jelly made from red currants and sugar, finished with brandy paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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To Make Red Currant Jelly

Why it works: Red currant and brandy work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 105 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

To Make Red Currant Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Gather currants when they are dry and ripe.

  2. Strip them off the stalks and place in a large pot.

  3. Cover with paper and let stand in a cool oven for 1 hour.

  4. Strain the mixture through a cloth to extract the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. For every quart of juice, add 1 ½ pounds of sugar, broken into small lumps.

  2. Stir gently over a clear fire until the sugar melts.

  3. Let it boil quickly for 10 minutes.

  4. Pour hot jelly into pots, cover with brandy paper, and store in a dry place.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Red currant + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the natural pectin and tart juice that set the jelly.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it thicken into a firm, glossy set.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugared juice quickly. Sugar must dissolve fully before a brisk boil, otherwise crystals can form and the jelly may not set firmly. A quick boil concentrates the sugar and pectin so the jelly reaches its setting point.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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