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Dessert

Black Raspberry Jell

A thickened mixture of black raspberries, water, raspberry juice, currant juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Raspberry and currant work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 366 recipes. Both carry ethyl benzoate, which smells fruity, sweet. The science ↓

Black Raspberry Jell

Ingredients

Directions

Make the juice

  1. Heat the raspberries and water thoroughly and squeeze out the juice.

  2. Combine 2 pints of raspberry juice with 1 pint of currant juice.

Cook the jelly

  1. Add 1 pint of sugar for each pint of the juice mixture.

  2. Cook the mixture for about 15 minutes until it thickens.

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. Raspberry + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together366 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  2. Raspberry + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,101 recipes

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

  3. 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

Black raspberries
Provide the main fruit flavour and the pectin-bearing juice that helps the jelly set.
Currant juice
Adds tartness and extra natural pectin to balance the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set by binding water and firming the gel.

The step that matters

Cooking until it thickens. Sugar and pectin set only at a sufficiently high concentration, so the mixture must cook long enough to thicken. Undercooking leaves a runny jelly, while overcooking can make it stiff or dull in flavour.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Red currantfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raspberry, sugar. 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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