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Dessert

Black Currant Jelly

A jelly made from black currants, sugar, and water.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the fruit from the stalks and clip off the tops.

  2. Weigh an equal amount of sugar and black currants.

Make the jelly

  1. Melt the sugar with a little water.

  2. Mix the melted sugar with the fruit and let it sit for a few hours.

  3. Stir until it boils, then skim off any foam.

  4. Boil for twenty minutes, then pour into jars.

Seal

  1. Cover with thick paper or skin.

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
Provides the main flavour, acidity and natural pectin that help the jelly set.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, as it thickens, helps it set and keep.

The step that matters

Boil for twenty minutes. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar and pectin until the mixture gels. Boiling too briefly leaves the jelly runny, while boiling too long 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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