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Dessert

To Preserve Currants

A method of preserving currants by boiling them with water and sugar, then drying or storing them.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and currant 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 ↓

To Preserve Currants

Ingredients

Directions

Make the currant syrup

  1. Place currants in a preserving pan with water.

  2. Boil until the fruit bursts.

  3. Strain the juice twice and clarify it.

  4. Add an equal weight of sugar to the juice and boil together for 15 minutes.

  5. Skim well and pour into pots.

Preserve dry currants

  1. For dry preservation, tie currants in bunches.

  2. Boil sugar until very strong, then dip in currants.

  3. Boil quickly until sugar coats them.

  4. Let settle for 15 minutes, then boil until sugar rises to the top.

  5. Skim and set aside until the next day.

  6. Drain and spread out currants to dry, ensuring they don't stick together.

  7. Dust with sugar and dry in a hot oven.

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 + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant 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
Provide the fruit flavour and, through their natural pectin, help the juice set when boiled with sugar.
Sugar
Preserves the fruit by drawing out water, and forms a thick syrup and sugar coating.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar until very strong before dipping the currants. If the sugar syrup is not boiled far enough, it stays thin and will not coat the fruit or dry into a crisp sugar layer. Overboiling, however, can turn it brittle or hard to work with.

“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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