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Dessert

Black Currant Jelly

A preserve made from black currants, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Gather the fruit on a dry day.

  2. Remove the fruit from the stalks.

  3. In a preserving pan, combine the currants and water.

  4. Bruise the currants until they are scalded.

Extract the juice

  1. Pour the mixture into a fine sieve.

  2. Press out all the juice from the sieve.

  3. Strain the juice through a piece of muslin.

Make the jam

  1. Add 1 pound of sugar for each pint of juice, breaking it into small pieces.

  2. Combine the juice and sugar in the preserving pan.

  3. Stir until it boils.

  4. Let it boil for 3 minutes.

  5. Skim off any foam.

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
Provide the fruit flavour, natural pectin and acidity that give the jam its body and tang.
Fine loaf sugar
Sweetens the jam and, with the boiling, helps it thicken and set and keeps it preserved.
Water
Helps the currants soften and release their juice during the initial cooking.

The step that matters

Boil the juice and sugar. Boiling the juice and sugar concentrates the mixture and lets pectin and acid set the jam. Boiling too briefly leaves it runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

“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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