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Dessert

White Currant Jam, a Beautiful Preserve

A preserve made by boiling white currants with sugar and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

White Currant Jam, a Beautiful Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil equal quantities of white currants and sugar together quickly for seven minutes.

  2. Stir the mixture gently the whole time and skim thoroughly.

  3. Just before removing from heat, add the strained juice of one lemon.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. White currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

White currants
Provide the fruit flavor and natural pectin that helps the jam set as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam, helps it set, and preserves it for storage.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and supports pectin setting.

The step that matters

Boil quickly for seven minutes while stirring. A brisk boil reaches the concentration needed for the jam to set. Constant stirring keeps the dense sugar syrup from scorching on the bottom of the pan, which would give a burnt, bitter taste.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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