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Currant Jjelly

Currant jelly made by mashing currants, extracting juice, cooking with sugar, and setting with egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Currant Jjelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Wash the currants but do not stem them.

  2. Mash the currants and strain through a jelly strainer to collect the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. In a preserving kettle, combine 1 pound of sugar for each pint of juice.

  2. Heat the juice alone on the stove until it begins to boil.

  3. Gradually stir in the sugar and let it boil for 5 minutes after all the sugar is added.

  4. Remove from heat and fill tumblers with the jelly.

Seal

  1. Seal the tumblers with white paper pasted on using egg whites.

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 + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  2. Currant + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. 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 juice that sets into the jelly and supplies its tart, fruity flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps the mixture set into a firm, spreadable gel.
Egg whites
Act as a glue to paste the paper seals onto the tumblers.

The step that matters

Boiling after the sugar is added. Sugar must dissolve fully before the long boil, and the boil must run long enough to concentrate the juice so it gels when cooled. Too short a boil leaves the jelly runny.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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 →

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