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Dessert

Black Currant Jelly

A jelly made from ripe black currants, water, sugar, and brandy paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and brandy work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Black Currant Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Gather the currants on a dry day and strip them off the stalks.

  2. Put the currants into a large stewpot and add 2 quarts of water.

  3. Cover with paper and set in a cool oven for 2 hours.

  4. Squeeze the mixture through a very fine cloth.

Make the jelly

  1. For every quart of juice, add 1½ pounds of broken loaf sugar and stir gently until melted.

  2. Bring to a boil, skimming well, and let it boil quickly for 30 minutes.

  3. Pour into pots and cover with brandy paper.

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 + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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 fruit flavour and natural pectin that help the juice set into jelly.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps the jelly set firm and hold its shape.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugared juice. Boiling quickly after the sugar dissolves drives off water so the concentrated sugar and pectin can set. Skimming removes foam that would cloud the jelly. Too short a boil leaves it runny and prone to spoiling.

Swap the black currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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