Why it works: Sugar and currant 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 ↓
Cheesy Jam
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fruit
Weigh the fruit before stoning and allow half the weight of sugar.
Stone the cherries and boil them in a preserving pan until nearly all the juice is dried up.
Make the jam
Add the crushed sugar and red-currant juice, using 1 pint for every 6 lbs of cherries and 1 lb of sugar for every pint of juice.
Boil all together until it jellies, about 20 minutes to ½ hour.
Skim the jam well and keep it stirred.
A few minutes before it's done, crack some of the stones and add the kernels for flavor.
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.
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Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together12,256 recipes
Sugar and currant 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
- Cherries
- Provide the main fruit flavor and the bulk of the jam.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the jam and, with boiling, helps it thicken and set.
- Red-currant juice
- Adds tartness and acid that helps the jam set.
The step that matters
Boil until it jellies. Jam sets when enough water evaporates and the sugar and acid allow pectin in the fruit to form a gel. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while boiling too long can make it stiff and dull in flavor.
“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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