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Dessert

Jam, Mixed, Superior

Jam made from black cherries, black currants, raspberries, and red currant juice, sweetened with 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 ↓

Jam, Mixed, Superior

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove pits from the black cherries and combine them with the black currants and raspberries.

Cook the fruit

  1. Boil the cherries for 20 minutes.

  2. Add the currants, raspberries, and red currant juice to the pot.

  3. Boil until the fruit is broken down.

Add sugar and finish

  1. Stir in 1 pound of sugar for every pint of fruit.

  2. Boil gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Skim off any foam, then pour the jam into jars and cover.

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 cherries
Provides much of the fruit flavor and body of the jam.
Red currant juice
Adds liquid and tart acidity that brightens the fruit flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps it set and keep well.
Raspberries
Adds fruit flavor and aroma to the mixed jam.

The step that matters

Stirring in the sugar. The sugar must dissolve fully before the mixture is boiled hard, so it does not scorch on the bottom of the pot. Sugar also helps the jam set, so the gentle boil that follows matters. Undercooking leaves the jam runny.

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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