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Dessert

Black Currant Jelly

A jelly made from ripe dry black currants, water, and loaf sugar, boiled until it sets.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Place black currants and water in a large stew pot.

  2. Cover and set in a cool oven for 2 hours.

  3. Squeeze the mixture through a fine cloth to extract the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. Add 1.5 pounds of broken loaf sugar to each quart of juice.

  2. Stir until the sugar is melted, then bring to a boil.

  3. Skim off any foam, then boil quickly until it jellies.

  4. To test, dip a skimmer into the jelly; it should hang in a drop when done.

Pot and store

  1. Pour into pots, 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.

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 natural pectin and acid that allow the juice to set into a jelly.
Loaf sugar
Helps the jelly set, adds sweetness, and preserves the finished jelly.

The step that matters

Boil until it jellies. Jelly sets only when pectin, acid and sugar reach the right concentration at a boil. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while boiling too long can make it stiff and dull in flavor. The skimmer drop test helps you judge when setting point is reached.

“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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