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Dessert

Black Currant Jelly

A jelly made from boiled black currants and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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

Extract the juice

  1. Boil the currants until the juice flows.

  2. Strain the juice through a jelly bag.

Make the jelly

  1. Set the juice over the fire for 20 minutes.

  2. Add ½ pound of sugar to the juice.

  3. Boil for about 10 minutes.

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
Provide the juice, plus natural pectin and acid that help the jelly set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with heat and acid, helps the jelly set firm.

The step that matters

Boiling after adding the sugar. Sugar, acid and pectin set into a gel only when the mixture reaches a high enough concentration by boiling. Boiling too briefly leaves the jelly runny, while boiling too long can darken and toughen it.

“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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