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White-Currant Jelly

A preserved jelly made from white currants, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: White currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. The science ↓

White-Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick the currants from their stalks and crush them in a preserving pan with a wooden spoon until they yield juice.

  2. Squeeze the crushed currants through a straining cloth to extract all the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. Measure the juice and add 1 lb of sugar for each pint of juice and 4 teacups of cold water to a preserving pan.

  2. Boil the sugar and water mixture, skimming off any scum, until the water has evaporated.

  3. To test, dip a spoon into the boiling mixture, then into cold water; if it cracks when touched, it's ready.

  4. Stir in the currant juice.

  5. Bring to just boiling, avoiding further boiling to prevent color spoilage.

Jar

  1. Pour into jars and cover once cool to exclude air.

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. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

White currants
Provide the juice and natural pectin that help the jelly set.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, with the pectin, helps it set firm.

The step that matters

Stop at the set test and avoid over-boiling after adding the juice. As water evaporates, sugar and pectin concentrate and the jelly sets. Boiling the juice too long can darken the color and dull the flavor, so bring it just to a boil.

“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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