Skip to main content
Dessert

Red or White Currant Jelly

Currants boiled, juice extracted, sweetened with sugar, cooked to a jelly consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Red or White Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Strip the currants from their stems and place them in a jug.

  2. Stand the jug in a kettle of water and boil for one hour.

  3. Pour the currants into a fine sieve and press out all the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. For every pint of juice, add 1 pound of loaf sugar.

  2. Put the mixture in a preserving pan over a clear fire and stir until it becomes jelly.

  3. Skim off any foam carefully while cooking.

  4. Once done, pour the jelly into jars.

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

Currants
Provide the juice that sets into the jelly, along with their natural pectin and tartness.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it thicken into a firm, spreadable set.

The step that matters

Stirring the juice and sugar until it becomes jelly. Sugar and fruit acid must be cooked together long enough for pectin to set. Undercooking leaves a runny result, while overcooking can make the jelly dull or sugary.

“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 jelly recipes

Red 93Black 55Sauce 50White 38French 11Tartlets 7 See all 365 →

You might also like

Currant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes