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Dessert

Black Currant Jam

A jam made from black currants, sugar, lemon juice, and water, boiled until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and lemon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Black Currant Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pick the finest black currants, leaving out small or unripe ones.

  2. Bruise the currants in a bowl.

  3. Put the currants in a pan with 1 teacup of water.

Cook and pot

  1. Boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Add 1½ to 2 pounds of moist sugar and the juice of 1 lemon.

  3. Boil for another 30 minutes.

  4. Pour into sweetmeat 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 + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together53 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Black currants
Provide the fruit flavour and natural pectin that lets the jam set.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the jam thicken and keep well.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps pectin set.

The step that matters

Boiling after the sugar is added. Sugar and acid help pectin form a gel, but boiling too long darkens the colour and dulls the fresh fruit flavour. Check that the jam sets before potting.

Swap the black currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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