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To Make Red Currant Jelly

A jelly made from red currants and sugar, boiled and set in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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To Make Red Currant Jelly

Why it works: Red currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

To Make Red Currant Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the currants

  1. Gather your currants when they are dry and fully ripe.

  2. Strip them from the stalks.

  3. Put them in a large stew pot and cover with paper.

  4. Let stand in a cool oven for 1 hour.

  5. Strain the currants through a cloth.

Make the jelly

  1. To every quart of juice, add 1.5 pounds of sugar and stir gently over a clear fire until melted.

  2. Skim well and let it boil quickly for 20 minutes.

  3. Pour hot jelly into pots.

  4. Cover with brandy papers 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 + 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

Red currants
Provide the juice and natural pectin that set the jelly.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps the jelly thicken and set as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugared juice. Boiling quickly for the full time drives off water and concentrates the pectin and sugar so the jelly sets when cooled. Too little boiling leaves it runny, while overcooking can make it stiff or dull in flavor.

“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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