Skip to main content
Dessert

Black-currant Jam

Jam made from black currants, sugar, and water, boiled and preserved in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Isabella Beeton · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Black-currant Jam

1 dozen pots of jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Let the fruit be very ripe, and gather it on a dry day.

  2. Strip the fruit from the stalks.

  3. Put the fruit into a preserving pan, adding a gill of water per pound of fruit.

  4. Boil the fruit and water together for 10 minutes.

Make the jam

  1. Add the sugar.

  2. Boil the jam again for 30 minutes, or longer if it does not set when a little is poured onto a plate.

  3. Keep stirring to prevent burning, carefully remove all scum.

  4. When done, pour the jam into pots.

  5. Let it cool.

Cover and seal the pots

  1. Cover the top of the jam with oiled paper.

  2. Cover the top of the jars with a piece of tissue paper brushed over on both sides with the white of an egg.

  3. When cold, the egg white forms a hard stiff cover that excludes air.

By Isabella Beeton. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Currants
Provide the fruit, pectin and flavour that form the body of the jam.
Sugar (in the method)
Sweetens the jam and helps it thicken and set as it boils.
Water
Helps the fruit soften and begin releasing its juice before the sugar is added.

The step that matters

Boiling the jam until it sets. Sugar must be added to fruit that is already cooked to a soft pulp, then boiled long enough for the pectin and sugar to reach a gel. Too little boiling leaves runny jam, and the spot-on-a-plate test shows whether it has set.

“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.

You might also like

Grape SherbetGrape Sherbet32 recipesGrapefruit MarmaladeGrapefruit Marmalade16 recipesGrape ButterGrape Butter9 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes