Skip to main content
Dessert

Black Currant Lozenges

A sweet, dried confection made from black currant juice and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Lozenges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Mash the black currants in a preserving kettle until heated through.

  2. Strain the mashed currants through a sieve to extract the juice.

Make the lozenges

  1. Combine 1 pint of the juice with ¼ pound of brown sugar in the kettle.

  2. Boil the mixture for one hour, stirring occasionally.

  3. Spread the mixture evenly and thinly on sheets of tin.

  4. Dry the lozenges before the fire until hard.

  5. Cut into lozenge shapes using an apple corer.

  6. Store the lozenges on white paper in a box.

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 juice that gives the lozenges their flavour and colour.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and, once boiled and dried, helps the lozenges set hard.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for one hour. Boiling concentrates the juice and sugar by driving off water. Too little boiling leaves the lozenges soft and sticky, while the set depends on enough sugar concentration.

“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.

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes