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Dessert

Black Currant Jam

Jam made from black currants and powdered loaf sugar, boiled until thick.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pick the currants from the stalks and bruise them well.

  2. In a pot, combine the currants and sugar.

Cook and pot

  1. Boil for half an hour, stirring constantly and skimming off any foam.

  2. Once thickened, pour the jam into pots.

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
Supply the fruit flavour, tartness, and natural pectin that helps the jam set.
Powdered loaf sugar
Adds sweetness, helps preserve the jam, and works with the fruit to thicken it as it sets.

The step that matters

Boiling with constant stirring and skimming. Sugar-rich fruit can scorch on the bottom of the pot, giving a burnt taste. Stirring prevents this, and skimming removes foam, which is impurities rising to the surface. As water evaporates, the sugar, fruit pectin, and acid combine to gel, so the jam thickens properly only if it boils long enough.

“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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