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Dessert

Black Currant Paste

A thick paste made by baking black currants, sieving, cooking with powdered sugar, and drying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

Black Currant Paste

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pulp

  1. Place the currants in an earthen jar or pan.

  2. Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven for 6 hours.

  3. Pass the baked currants through a fine sieve to extract the pulp.

Cook and dry

  1. Transfer the pulp to a preserving pan and cook over low heat until very thick.

  2. Add powdered sugar to taste and stir for a few minutes.

  3. Spread the mixture on tin plates to dry.

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 + 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

Currants
Provide the main flavour, colour and the pulp that sets into the paste.
Powdered lump sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the paste thicken and keep its body as it dries.

The step that matters

Cooking the pulp until very thick. Water must evaporate slowly over low heat so the pulp concentrates and sets firmly. Stopping too early leaves a soft paste that may spoil or fail to hold its shape when dried.

“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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