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Dessert

Black Currant Jam

A jam made by cooking black currants with sugar until thickened.

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

Black Currant Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the black currants and remove any stems.

  2. In a pot, combine the black currants and sugar in equal weights.

Cook

  1. Cook over medium heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

  2. Bring to a gentle boil and cook for a shorter time than red gooseberry jam, until it reaches the desired consistency.

Jar

  1. Pour into sterilized jars and seal.

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 fruit flavour, natural pectin and acidity that help the jam set.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam, preserves it and helps it thicken as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boiling to the right consistency. Cooking too briefly leaves the jam runny, while cooking too long can darken and dull the fruit flavour. Sugar and fruit pectin set as the mixture reduces, so judging the consistency by eye or by a cold-plate test matters.

“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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