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Dessert

Black Currant Jam

A jam made from black currants, sugar, and water, boiled until set.

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 Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fruit

  1. Strip the fruit from the stalks and place it in a kettle with the water.

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

Make the jam

  1. Add the sugar and boil again for 40 minutes, stirring to prevent burning.

  2. Check if the jam sets by pouring a little on a plate; boil longer if necessary.

Finish and jar

  1. Remove all the scum and pour the jam into sterilized jars while hot.

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 fruit flavor, acidity and natural pectin that help the jam set.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the jam and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it gel and keep.

The step that matters

Testing for set. Jam sets as pectin, sugar and acid form a gel only at the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves runny jam, while boiling too long can make it stiff and dull in flavor, so test on a cold plate before jarring.

“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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