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Dessert

To Make Black Currant Jelly

A jelly made from black currants, water, and sugar, boiled and set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

To Make Black Currant Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick the currants off the stalks and place them in a large stewpot.

  2. Add 1 quart of water and cover with a paper.

  3. Set the pot in a cool oven for 2 hours.

  4. Squeeze the mixture through a very thin cloth to extract the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. For every quart of juice, add 1½ pounds of loaf sugar broken into small pieces.

  2. Stir gently until the sugar is melted.

  3. Bring to a boil and skim well.

  4. Let it boil for 30 minutes over a clear fire.

  5. Pour the hot jelly into pots and cover with brandy papers.

Store

  1. Store in a dry place for use.

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 fruit juice that sets into the jelly, along with most of the flavour.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps the jelly set firm when boiled.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar and juice. Boiling for the stated time concentrates the mixture and drives off water so it can set. Too short a boil leaves it runny, while skimming removes foam that would cloud the jelly.

“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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