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To Preserve Raspberries

A method for preserving raspberries by cooking them with sugar and red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

To Preserve Raspberries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pick raspberries on a dry day, just before they are fully ripe, and lay them in a dish.

  2. Beat and sift an equal weight of fine sugar over the raspberries.

Make the jelly syrup

  1. In a pot, combine the red currant jelly and its weight in fine sugar.

  2. Boil and skim well.

Scald and rest

  1. Add the raspberries to the jelly mixture and scald them.

  2. Remove from heat and let them stand for two hours.

  3. Return to heat and scald until the raspberries look clear.

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 + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Raspberries
Provide the main fruit flavour and bulk of the preserve.
Red currant jelly
Adds natural pectin and tartness that help the preserve set and balance sweetness.
Fine sugar
Sweetens and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out moisture and inhibiting spoilage.

The step that matters

Scalding the raspberries until they look clear. Heating must be gentle enough to keep the berries whole while cooking off water and letting the sugar and pectin set the fruit. Overheating can break the berries down and make the preserve cloudy or tough.

“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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