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To Make Currant Paste, Either Red or White

Currant paste is a sweet preserve made from currants, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

To Make Currant Paste, Either Red or White

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Strip the currants and add a little juice to prevent burning.

  2. Boil the currants well and rub them through a fine sieve.

Make the paste

  1. Boil the juice for 15 minutes.

  2. Add 1½ pounds of sugar to a pint of juice and stir until melted.

  3. Pour the mixture onto plates and dry as desired.

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. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants
Provide the fruit flavour, colour and pectin that give the paste its body and set.
Double refined sugar
Sweetens the paste and, at high concentration, helps it set firm and keep well.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar to the juice. The sugar must fully dissolve in the hot juice. Undissolved crystals leave a gritty texture, and the right sugar concentration is needed for the paste to set rather than stay soft or sticky.

“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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