Name: Currant Jam, Black, Red, or White
Ingredients: 1 pound currants; 12 ounces loaf sugar

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

1 pound currants
12 ounces loaf sugar

Directions

Pick the currants from the stalks and bruise them.
For every pound of currants, add 12 ounces of loaf sugar and stir well.
Boil the mixture 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.

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 fruit, pectin and tartness that give the jam its body and flavor.
Loaf sugar: Sweetens the jam and helps it thicken and keep as it cooks down.

“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.