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Dessert

Black-currant Jelly

A sweet jelly made from black currants, water, sugar, and preserved with brandy paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,057 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Black-currant Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the currants

  1. Strip off the stalks from the currants and place them in an earthen pan.

  2. Add the water.

  3. Set the pan in a cool oven for 2 hours, covering it with a paper.

  4. Squeeze the mixture through a fine cloth or hair sieve into a preserving pan.

Make the jelly

  1. Add the sugar and stir gently until it melts.

  2. Let it boil, skimming off any foam.

  3. Let it boil quickly over a clear fire for 30 minutes.

  4. Pour it into pots and cover the pots with brandy paper.

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 + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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 fruit flavour and the pectin that sets the jelly.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps the jelly set as it boils down.

The step that matters

Boiling the sweetened juice. Boiling quickly for the full 30 minutes drives off water and concentrates the sugar and pectin so the jelly sets when cool. Too little boiling leaves it runny.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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