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Dessert

Red Currant Jam

Jam made from ripe red currants and sugar, boiled until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,156 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Red Currant Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the currants

  1. Remove the stalks from the currants.

  2. Place the currants in a cane sieve over a preserving pan and rub them through with your hands.

Make the jam

  1. Add the sugar to the pan and set it over a brisk fire.

  2. Boil for about 20 minutes.

  3. To test if it's done, drop a little on a cold plate; if it sets in a minute or two, it's ready.

  4. If not, continue boiling slowly until it sets.

Pot and store

  1. Pour the jam into pots or jars and cover once cool.

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. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the fruit, pectin and acidity that give the jam its flavour and ability to set.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps it set by binding water and concentrating the fruit.

The step that matters

Testing for the set. Pectin and sugar only gel at the right concentration, so jam boiled too briefly stays runny while overboiling can make it stiff and dull. A cold-plate test shows whether it has reached setting point.

“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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