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Dessert

Currants for Tarts

Currants are cooked with sugar and currant juice until clear, then stored in a jar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar 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 ↓

Currants for Tarts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the currant filling

  1. In a pan, combine the sugar with enough currant juice to dissolve it.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil and skim off any foam.

  3. Add the currants and boil until they are clear.

Store

  1. Transfer the currants to a jar and seal tightly for storage.

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

Currant and sugar 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

Currants
Provide the main fruit flavour and tartness that the filling is built around.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved into the juice, creates a syrup that holds the currants.

The step that matters

Boiling until the currants are clear. Boiling dissolves the sugar into a syrup and lets the currants turn clear as they soften. Stopping too early leaves the syrup thin and the fruit underdone, while overcooking can make the sugar too thick and the fruit lose its shape.

“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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