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Dessert

Black Currant Jelly

A preserve made from black currants, water, and sugar, boiled until it gels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Black Currant Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Combine black currants and water in a large pot.

  2. Cover the pot with paper.

  3. Place the pot in a cool oven for 2 hours.

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

Make the jelly

  1. Add 1½ pounds of sugar for every quart of juice.

  2. Stir the mixture until the sugar melts.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Skim off any foam.

  5. Boil quickly until it jellies.

  6. Test the jelly by dipping a skimmer; it should hang in a drop.

  7. Avoid overcooking to preserve flavor.

Pot and store

  1. Pour the jelly into pots.

  2. Cover the pots with brandy papers.

  3. Store the pots in a dry place.

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. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants
Provide the fruit, pectin and tart flavor that the jelly sets and tastes of.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the juice and, when boiled down, helps the jelly set firm.

The step that matters

Boil quickly until it jellies. Overcooking breaks down pectin and flavor, while undercooking leaves the jelly runny. Testing with a skimmer, where the drop hangs and sheets off, shows when the set point is reached.

“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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