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Dessert

Best Black Currant Jam

A jam made by stewing black currants with their juice, sweetened with sugar, and cooked until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Best Black Currant Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Stew the currants in their own juice until tender, about 15 minutes.

  2. Rub the mixture through a sieve to remove skins.

Make the jam

  1. Gradually stir in the sugar off the heat until dissolved.

  2. Boil the mixture gently for 10 minutes until thickened.

  3. Let it cool; it will firm up as it sets.

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. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants
Provide the main fruit flavour, tartness, and the pectin that helps the jam set.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps it thicken and set as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture gently for 10 minutes until thickened. Sugar must be fully dissolved before boiling so it does not crystallise. Gentle boiling concentrates the sugar and fruit pectin so the jam sets properly without scorching.

“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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