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To Preserve Currants for Tarts

This recipe preserves currants by boiling them with sugar and storing them in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

To Preserve Currants for Tarts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick the currants off the stalks and ensure they are dry.

  2. Bruise a few currants to dissolve the sugar.

Cook

  1. Combine the bruised currants with the sugar and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the remaining currants and boil for 20 minutes.

Jar and store

  1. Transfer to jars and cover with a brandy paper.

  2. Store 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. 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
Form the bulk of the preserve and supply the fruit flavour and set.
Sugar
Preserves the fruit and sweetens it, helping it thicken as it boils.

The step that matters

Boiling the currants with the sugar. Boiling for the stated time helps the sugar concentrate and the pectin in the fruit set the preserve. Under-boiling can leave it runny and more prone to spoiling.

“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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