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Dessert

White Currant Jam

A jam made from white currants, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

White Currant Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick over the white currants carefully.

  2. Weigh an equal quantity of sifted white sugar.

Make the jam

  1. Boil the currants and sugar together for 10 minutes, stirring gently.

  2. Skim off any foam that forms.

  3. Add the juice of 1 lemon and mix well.

  4. Seal the jam while hot.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. White currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

White currants
Provide the fruit flavour and pectin that give the jam its body as it sets.
White sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps preserve it and thicken it as it cooks.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps the pectin set.

The step that matters

Boiling the currants and sugar together. Boiling must be steady enough to reach the setting point, since too little cooking leaves the jam runny, while stirring gently prevents the sugar from scorching on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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