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Dessert

Currant Jelly

Currant Jelly is a sweet preserve made by extracting juice from currants and boiling it with sugar until it sets.

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 Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick the currants and place them in a stone jar.

  2. Stew the jar in a saucepan of boiling water until the juice is extracted.

  3. Strain the juice through a sieve without pressing the currants.

Make the jelly

  1. Boil the juice in an enameled saucepan with an equal weight of loaf sugar, removing the scum as it rises.

  2. When the mixture jellies on the back of a cold spoon, it is done.

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 natural pectin and acid that let the juice set into a jelly.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it thicken and set when boiled.

The step that matters

Boil until the jelly sets on a cold spoon. Boiling concentrates the juice and sugar until pectin and acid can form a gel. Under-boiled jelly stays runny, while over-boiling can make it stiff and dull in flavor.

“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.

More currant jelly recipes

Red 93Black 55Sauce 50White 38French 11Tartlets 7 See all 365 →

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