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Preserve

Nursery Preserve

A preserve made from cherries, raspberries, currants, and sugar, boiled until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and white currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Nursery Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the pitted cherries in water for 20 minutes.

  2. Add the raspberries, red currants, and white currants to the cherries and boil briskly for another 20 minutes.

  3. Stir in the sugar and continue boiling for 15 minutes, stirring constantly to prevent burning.

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. Red currant + white curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

  3. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries
Provides the main fruit body and sweet-tart flavour of the preserve.
Raspberries
Adds aroma and bright fruity flavour to the preserve.
Red currants
Their natural pectin helps the preserve thicken and set.
White currants
Their natural pectin helps the preserve thicken and set, and add tart acidity.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and, at this concentration, helps the preserve set and keep.

The step that matters

Stirring the sugar in while boiling. Sugar is added to a hot, thick fruit mixture that can scorch on the bottom of the pot. Constant stirring spreads the heat and prevents burning, which would give the preserve a bitter, caramelised taste.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red 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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