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Dessert

Black Currant Jelly

A sweet preserve made from black currants, sugar, and water, set into jelly and sealed with brandy paper and white paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and brandy work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Black Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Wash the black currants and remove any stems.

  2. In a pot, combine black currants and water, then bring to a boil.

  3. Simmer until the currants are soft, then strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

  4. Measure the liquid and add an equal amount of sugar.

Make and jar the jelly

  1. Boil the mixture until it reaches the desired jelly consistency.

  2. Pour into sterilized jars, cover with brandy paper, and seal with white paper pricked full of holes.

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 + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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 natural pectin and tart flavour that give the jelly its set and character.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with boiling, helps the juice thicken into a firm, preservable set.

The step that matters

Boil to the right jelly consistency. Undercooked jelly stays runny because the sugar and pectin have not concentrated enough to set, while overcooking can make it stiff and grainy. Pectin needs a high sugar concentration and acid to form a gel, so the boil must be judged carefully.

Swap the black currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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