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Currant Jelly

Currant jelly is made by extracting juice from currants, boiling with sugar, and setting the mixture in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar 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

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Jam and strain the currants to extract the juice.

Cook the jelly

  1. Combine 4 cups of currant juice with 1 pound of sugar in a pot.

  2. Boil the currant juice for 15 minutes without sugar.

  3. Add the sugar and boil for another 15 minutes.

Strain and pour

  1. Strain the mixture into glasses.

  2. Wet a towel with cold water and place it on a table.

  3. Set the cold jars on the towel and pour the boiling jelly into them.

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. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar 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

Currants
Provide the juice and natural pectin and acidity that help the jelly set.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, once boiled with the juice, helps it set firmly.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice before adding the sugar. Boiling the juice first concentrates it and starts pectin extraction. Adding sugar only after this and boiling until the mixture reaches the gel point lets the jelly set. Undercooking leaves it runny, while overcooking can make it stiff or cloudy.

“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.

More currant jelly recipes

Red 93Black 55Sauce 50White 38French 11Tartlets 7 See all 365 →

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