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Red Currant Jelly

A preserve made from ripe red currants and sugar, boiled and strained into jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Red Currant Jelly

Why it works: Red currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Red Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Strip the currants from the stems carefully.

  2. Mix the currants with an equal weight of sugar, reduced to powder.

Cook

  1. Boil the mixture quickly for exactly eight minutes, stirring constantly. Skim off any scum that rises to the surface.

Jar and store

  1. Pour the preserve through a clean sieve into small jars. Store the jars in a cool, dry place until completely cold.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the fruit flavour and the natural pectin and acid that help the jelly set.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it gel and keeps it stable.

The step that matters

Boil quickly for exactly eight minutes. Fast, timed boiling concentrates the sugar and pectin so the mixture reaches a set. Boiling too long can darken the flavour and weaken the gel, while stopping too early can leave it runny.

“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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