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Dessert

Currant Jelly

Currant jelly is made by extracting juice from currants, sweetening with sugar, boiling to a jelly consistency, and setting in glasses.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Place the currants in a stew jar and put it in a cool oven to draw out the juice.

  2. Strain the juice and measure it.

Make the jelly

  1. Add 1 lb of sugar for every pint of juice.

  2. Boil the mixture until it reaches a jelly consistency.

  3. Pour the jelly into glasses and cover when cool.

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 that, with sugar, forms the jelly's flavour and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it set into a firm jelly when boiled.

The step that matters

Boil until it reaches a jelly consistency. Boiling concentrates the sugar and fruit pectin until the mixture gels on cooling. Under-boiling leaves a runny result, while over-boiling can make the jelly 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.

More currant jelly recipes

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

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