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Preserved Wet Fruits

Currants preserved by boiling in syrup and apple jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,918 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Preserved Wet Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup and jelly

  1. Boil the syrup until it reaches a crack.

  2. Make a jelly with 1 quart of syrup boiled to a crack and 1 quart of apple jelly.

Cook the currants

  1. Pour the syrup over the currants in a flat copper pan.

  2. Gently boil the currants, repeating this process two or three times, skimming as needed.

  3. Add the jelly to the currants and boil together for 5 minutes.

  4. Transfer the mixture into pots.

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 + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Syrup + appletop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together742 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Currant + syruptop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together329 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Currants
Provide the fruit, which softens and holds its shape in the syrup as it cooks.
Syrup
Sweetens the fruit and draws moisture out of it, helping it preserve.
Apple jelly
Adds pectin to help the mixture thicken and set.

The step that matters

Repeated syrup pouring and gentle boiling. Pouring hot syrup over the fruit and boiling gently several times lets sugar slowly penetrate the currants without bursting them. Boiling hard can break the skins and make the fruit tough or cloudy.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (syrup, apple):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, apple. 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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