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Dessert

Black-currant Jam

A jam made from black currants, pounded loaf sugar, and a little water or red‑currant juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and currant work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Black-currant Jam

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pick the currants carefully.

  2. Combine equal amounts of black currants and pounded loaf sugar.

  3. Dissolve the sugar with the currants, adding a little water or red-currant juice.

  4. Boil the mixture and skim for 25 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 + curranttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant 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

Black currants
Provide the fruit pulp and tart flavour that form the body of the jam.
Pounded loaf sugar
Sweetens the jam and, as it dissolves and concentrates, helps it set and preserves it.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture and skim for 25 minutes. Once the sugar has dissolved, the mixture must boil hard enough to concentrate and reach setting point. Skimming removes foam and impurities so the jam stays clear. Boiling too briefly leaves it runny; boiling too long can darken and dull the flavour.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (black currant, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Red currantfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against black currant, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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