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Dessert

Black Currant Jam

A jam made from black currants and sugar, boiled with water or red‑currant juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and currant work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Black Currant Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick the currants carefully.

  2. Combine equal amounts of black currants and sugar in a pot.

  3. Add a little water or red-currant juice.

Cook

  1. Dissolve the sugar over low heat while mixing with the currants.

  2. Boil the mixture for 25 minutes, skimming off any foam that forms.

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 + curranttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29 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. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant 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

Black currants
Provide the main fruit flavour and natural pectin that helps the jam set.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam, preserves it and helps it thicken as it cooks.

The step that matters

Dissolve the sugar over low heat before boiling. Sugar that is still undissolved when the mixture boils can scorch on the base of the pot and later recrystallise in the finished jam. Melting it gently first gives a smooth, evenly sweetened result.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Red currantfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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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