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 Jelly
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the juice
Gather the black currants on a dry day and remove the stems.
Place the currants and water in a preserving pan and bruise the currants until they are scalded.
Pour the mixture into a fine sieve and press out all the juice with your hands.
Strain the juice through a piece of muslin.
Add the sugar
Add 1 pound of sugar for each pint of juice and stir until dissolved.
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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Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Provides the flavour, plus natural pectin and acid that help the jelly set.
- Fine loaf sugar
- Sweetens the jelly and helps it set and keep well.
The step that matters
Dissolve the sugar fully. Stir until every grain of sugar has dissolved. Undissolved sugar can later form crystals, which make the finished jelly grainy instead of clear and smooth.
“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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