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To Preserve Currants and Gooseberries

A method for preserving currants and gooseberries in sugar and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

To Preserve Currants and Gooseberries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare clean, dry bottles.

  2. Cut currants from larger stalks and gently drop them into the bottles.

  3. Add ¼ pound of pounded sugar to each bottle.

Seal and preserve

  1. Cover the bottles with bladder and place them in a saucepan filled with water up to the neck.

  2. Boil for half an hour, then let them sit in the water overnight.

  3. Store in a cool 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. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants
Provide the fruit that is preserved, with their tartness balanced by the sugar.
Gooseberries
Provide the fruit that is preserved, adding bulk and a tart flavour.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by drawing out moisture and limiting spoilage.

The step that matters

Boiling in the water bath. The bottles must be heated enough to drive air out and seal them. Keeping the water at the neck level ensures even heat around the bottles, which helps the fruit stay whole and preserved.

“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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