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Dessert

Nursery Preserve

A preserve made from cherries, raspberries, and currants simmered and boiled with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and white currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Nursery Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pit the cherries and simmer them for 20 minutes.

  2. Add the raspberries, red currants, and white currants to the cherries.

Cook the preserve

  1. Boil the mixture quickly for 20 minutes.

  2. Stir in the sugar and continue boiling for an additional 15 minutes. Stir the jam continuously to prevent burning.

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. Red currant + white curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Kentish cherries
Provide body, sweet-tart flavor, and fruit pulp for the preserve's texture.
Raspberries
Add bright aroma and fruity flavor to the preserve.
Red currants
Contribute natural pectin and acidity that help the preserve set.
White currants
Contribute natural pectin and acidity that help the preserve set.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it thicken and keep its set.

The step that matters

Stir in the sugar and keep stirring while boiling. Once sugar is added, the mixture is thick and sugar can scorch on the hot pan bottom, giving a burnt taste. Constant stirring spreads heat evenly and keeps the jam from sticking while the sugar dissolves and the preserve thickens.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red currant, sugar. 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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