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Dessert

Red Currant Marmalade

A preserve made from red currants, raisins, sugar, and oranges.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and orange work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Red Currant Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stem the currants and place them in a preserving kettle.

  2. Add the sugar, seeded and chopped raisins, and thinly sliced oranges.

Cook

  1. Boil for 20 minutes.

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. Red currant + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Raisin + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Red currants
Provide natural pectin and tartness that help the marmalade thicken and set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, once boiled, helps the mixture thicken and keep.
Raisins
Add sweetness, chewy body, and a deeper fruity flavour to the marmalade.
Oranges
Contribute citrus aroma, bitterness from the peel, and additional pectin for setting.

The step that matters

Boil for 20 minutes. Boiling concentrates the sugar and fruit pectin so the marmalade can gel. Boiling too briefly leaves it runny, while boiling too long can make it stiff and darken the flavour.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, sugar, orange):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, sugar, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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