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Currant Jelly, No. 1

A preserve made by boiling currants with water and sugar to form a jelly.

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, No. 1

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Wash the currants thoroughly and remove any stems.

  2. Place the currants in a pot with water and bring to a boil.

  3. Simmer until the currants are soft and have released their juice.

  4. Strain the mixture through a fine cloth to extract the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. Measure the juice and add an equal amount of sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture until it reaches the jelly stage.

  3. Pour into sterilized jars and seal.

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
Provide the fruit flavor and natural pectin that help the juice set into jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set by binding water and firming the gel.

The step that matters

Boiling to the jelly stage. Boil long enough to concentrate the sugar and pectin so the jelly sets. Too little boiling leaves it runny, while overboiling can make it stiff or cause sugar to crystallize.

“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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