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Dessert

Black Currant Jelly

A sweet jelly made from black 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: 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 ↓

Black Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick over the black currants.

  2. Stew the currants slowly in water and mash them.

  3. Strain the juice and measure it.

Make the jelly

  1. Add 1 pound of loaf sugar to the juice.

  2. Boil for 15 minutes.

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
Supply the juice, flavour, acidity and natural pectin that help the jelly set.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and, once concentrated by boiling, helps the juice set into a firm jelly.

The step that matters

Boil for 15 minutes. Boiling drives off water so the sugar and fruit acid concentrate enough for the pectin to set. Too short a boil leaves the jelly runny, while overboiling can dull the flavour and make it stiff.

“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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