Name: Currant Jelly—apple Jelly
Ingredients: 1 pound white sugar; juice of currants

Why it works: Sugar and currant 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 ↓

Currant Jelly—apple Jelly

Ingredients

1 pound white sugar
juice of currants

Directions

Make the jelly

Mix the currant juice and sugar together until the sugar is dissolved.
Pour the mixture into jars and seal them.

Set in the sun

Expose the jars to hot sun for two to three days.

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.

Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant 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

White sugar: Provides sweetness and, with the fruit's pectin, helps the juice set into a jelly.
Currant juice: Supplies the fruit flavour, acidity and liquid that forms the body of 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.