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Dessert

Currant Jelly

A jelly made from currants, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick and wash the currants.

  2. Place them in a kettle with a small amount of water and cook over moderate heat until the juice is extracted.

  3. Pour the mixture through a sieve and press gently with a wooden spoon to extract more juice.

  4. Weigh the juice and return it to the kettle.

Make the jelly

  1. Bring the juice to a boil and remove any scum that forms.

  2. Add an equal weight of sugar to the juice and skim quickly.

  3. Strain the mixture again through the sieve.

  4. Pour into small jars or tumblers immediately.

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. 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
Their natural pectin and acid let the juice set into a firm, tart jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it thicken and set as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Skimming the scum after adding sugar. Skimming removes foam and impurities that would cloud the jelly. Working quickly keeps the sugar-juice mixture from boiling long enough to darken or lose its fresh flavour.

“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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