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Currant Preserves

A preserve made by boiling currants with sugar to form a thick syrup.

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 ↓

Currant Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick the stems from 7 pounds of currants.

  2. Press the juice from the remaining 3 pounds of currants.

Make the preserves

  1. Combine the juice and sugar in a pot to make a hot syrup.

  2. Add the currants to the syrup and boil until thick and rich.

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, tartness and natural pectin that helps the preserves set.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as the syrup boils down, thickens it and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Boiling until thick and rich. The mixture must cook long enough for enough water to evaporate and sugar to concentrate, so pectin and sugar can gel as it cools. Stopping too early leaves a runny preserve, while overcooking can make it stiff, dark and sticky.

“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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