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Dessert

Black Currant Lozenges

A sweet candy made from brown sugar, black currant juice, and isinglass, formed into lozenges.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and black currant 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 Lozenges

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Mix brown sugar with black currant juice in an enamelled saucepan.

  2. Add dissolved isinglass and simmer gently for 45 minutes.

Set and store

  1. Pour the mixture into small plates in layers about ⅛ inch thick.

  2. Let the plates sit in a cool oven or warm place until the mixture is dry and hard.

  3. Stamp into shapes as desired.

  4. Remove the lozenges and store them in a tin box with paper between each layer.

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. Sugar + black curranttop 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

Brown sugar
Provides sweetness and body, and helps the set mixture hold together as a firm lozenge.
Black currant juice
Supplies the main flavour and acidity, and the liquid that is reduced to a firm, dry lozenge.
Isinglass
Gelatine-like protein that sets the mixture as it cools, giving the lozenges their firm, chewy texture.

The step that matters

Simmering with the isinglass. Isinglass must be fully dissolved and the mixture simmered gently, not boiled hard. Gentle heat keeps the set reliable and avoids scorching the sugar, which would darken and spoil the 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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