Name: Currant Jelly Without Boiling
Ingredients: very ripe currants; 1 pound powdered sugar

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 Without Boiling

Ingredients

very ripe currants
1 pound powdered sugar

Directions

Make the jelly

Squeeze the juice from the currants through a fine strainer.
Mix the juice with the powdered sugar until well combined.
Pass the mixture through a jelly bag.
Let it stand for a while.

Set and cover

Pour the jelly into small pots and place them in the sun for two days.
Cover the pots with paper as usual.

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.

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

Very ripe currants: Provide the juice, natural pectin and tartness that help the jelly set.
Powdered sugar: Adds sweetness and helps the jelly thicken and set as it cools.

“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.