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Dessert

Black Currant Jam

A jam made from black currants and sugar boiled for 30 minutes.

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. Gather the fruit when dry and ripe, and remove the stalks.

  2. Bruise the currants well in a bowl.

Cook and pot

  1. In a preserving pan, combine the currants and sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture for 30 minutes, stirring and skimming constantly.

  3. Pour the jam into pots for use.

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, pectin and tart flavour that give the jam its body and taste.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps it thicken and keep as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Boiling and skimming the mixture. Boiling for the full 30 minutes drives off water so the jam sets, and constant stirring prevents the sugar and fruit from scorching on the base of the pan. Skimming removes foam so the jam stays clear.

“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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