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Dessert

Black Currant Preserve

A preserve made from black currants, red currant juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and red currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 72 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Black Currant Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dry the black currants thoroughly and remove the heads and stalks.

  2. Place the currants in a preserving pan with the red currant juice and sugar.

Cook and jar

  1. Bring to a boil, skimming off any scum and scraping the fruit from the sides of the pan.

  2. Shake the pan gently without mashing the currants and boil for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Pour into jars and cover closely once 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. Black currant + red curranttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together72 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. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Black currants
Provide the main fruit flavour and body of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it set and keep well.
Red currant juice
Adds moisture and extra tartness to the fruit.

The step that matters

Shaking instead of stirring during the boil. Shaking the pan gently keeps the currants whole, while stirring or mashing breaks them down and makes the preserve cloudy and mushy. Scraping and skimming keep the surface clear.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Red currantthe original
  3. Blueberryfits less well
  4. Raspberryfits less well

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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