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Dessert

Currant Jam, Black, Red, or White

Currant jam made by bruising currants, adding sugar, and boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Currant Jam, Black, Red, or White

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick the currants clean from the stalks.

  2. Bruise the currants in a bowl.

Cook

  1. Add ¾ pound of loaf sugar to the bruised currants and stir well.

  2. Boil for 30 minutes.

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. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Ripe currants
Provide the fruit body, natural pectin and acidity that help the jam thicken and set.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the jam and, when boiled down, concentrates it and helps it set.

The step that matters

Boil for 30 minutes. Sugar and fruit must boil long enough to lose water and concentrate. Pectin and acid then form a gel as it cools. Stopping early leaves a runny jam.

“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.

More currant jam recipes

Black 54Red 28White 17Raspberry 5Spiced 5Green 4 See all 57 →

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