Name: Black or Red Currant Jelly
Ingredients: 2 quarts black or red currants, stalks removed; 1 lb loaf sugar for every pint of juice

Why it works: Red currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Black or Red Currant Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

2 quarts black or red currants, stalks removed
1 lb loaf sugar for every pint of juice

Directions

Extract the juice

Place the currants in a stone jar and set it in a pan of water.
Boil until the juice is extracted.
Strain the liquid and measure it.
For every pint of juice, weigh 1 lb of loaf sugar.

Make the jelly

Let the mixture stand until the sugar is nearly dissolved.
Transfer to a preserving pan and simmer.
Cook until it jellies on a plate, about 30 minutes.

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.

Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,156 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Black or red currants: Provide the juice, pectin and tart flavour that the jelly sets around.
Loaf sugar: Sweetens the juice and helps it set into a firm, spreadable jelly.

The step that matters

Cook until it jellies on a plate. Undercooking leaves the jelly runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull. A small cold-plate test shows when the pectin and sugar have reached the setting point.

“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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Black or Red Currant Jelly