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To Make Red Currant Jelly

A jelly made from ripe red currants and refined sugar.

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

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

  2. Remove the currants from the stalks and place them in a large pot.

  3. Cover the pot with paper and let it stand in a cool oven for 1 hour.

  4. Strain the mixture through a cloth to extract the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. For every quart of juice, add 1.5 pounds of sugar, broken into small lumps.

  2. Stir gently over a clear fire until the sugar is melted.

  3. Skim the mixture well and let it boil quickly for 20 minutes.

  4. Pour the hot jelly into pots immediately to prevent it from breaking.

Store

  1. Cover the pots 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 natural pectin and acidity, which together allow the juice to set into a firm jelly.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the juice gel while also preserving the finished jelly.

The step that matters

Boil quickly for 20 minutes. Boiling concentrates the sugar and pectin so the jelly can set. Boiling too briefly leaves it runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

“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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