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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 preserve

  1. Combine the red currant jelly and its weight of fine sugar in a pot.

  2. Boil the mixture and skim it.

  3. Add the raspberries to the jelly mixture.

  4. Scald the mixture.

  5. Remove the mixture from heat.

  6. Let the mixture stand for two hours.

  7. Return the mixture to heat.

  8. 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
Supply the main fruit flavour and the pieces that give the preserve its body.
Red currant jelly
Its natural pectin and tartness help the preserve set and give it a bright flavour.
Fine sugar
Sweetens the preserve and binds water, helping it thicken and keep.

The step that matters

Scald until the raspberries look clear. Heating too long or too hard breaks down the fruit and darkens the flavour, while too little heat leaves the pectin and sugar unable to set the preserve properly. Watch the fruit rather than the clock.

“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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