Skip to main content
Dessert

Currant Jelly

A preserve made from red and white currants cooked with sugar to form a jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Red currant and white currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pick over the currants without removing the stems, then wash and drain them.

  2. Mash a few currants in the bottom of a preserving kettle using a wooden potato masher, and continue until all berries are used.

  3. Cook the currants slowly until they look white.

Extract the juice

  1. Strain the mixture through a coarse strainer, then allow the juice to drop through a double thickness of cheesecloth or a jelly bag.

Make the jelly

  1. Measure the juice, bring it to a boil, and boil for five minutes.

  2. Add an equal measure of heated sugar, boil for three minutes, skim off any foam, and pour into jars.

Set and store

  1. Place the jars in a sunny window and let them stand for twenty-four hours.

  2. Cover the jars and keep them in a cool, dry place.

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. Red currant + white curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the main fruit flavour and the natural pectin and acid that help the jelly set.
White currants
Add tartness and fruit flavour, along with pectin and acid for setting.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set into a firm, spreadable gel.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice before adding sugar. Boiling the juice first concentrates it and activates the natural pectin. Adding the sugar after that lets the jelly gel properly. Too little boiling can leave the jelly runny.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red 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.

More currant jelly recipes

Red 93Black 55Sauce 50White 38French 11Tartlets 7 See all 365 →

You might also like

Currant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes