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Dessert

Black Currant Jam

A jam made from black currants, sugar, and a little apple juice or water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and apple share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 39 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Black Currant Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove stems and leaves from the black currants by hand.

Cook the jam

  1. Combine the currants, sugar, and a little apple juice or water in a pot.

  2. Boil the mixture over a brisk fire, stirring carefully.

  3. Cook until the jam reaches the desired consistency, as black currants congeal well.

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 + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together39 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Black currants
Provide the fruit, pectin and tartness that give the jam its body and flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps it thicken and set as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Cooking to the right consistency. Black currants are high in natural pectin and set well, so the jam can become stiff if overcooked. Stirring carefully while boiling prevents scorching on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the black currant

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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