Name: Currant Jelly and Walnut Filling
Ingredients: 1 cup English walnuts, chopped fine (or almonds); 1 cup currant jelly; boiled icing (optional, to taste)

Why it works: Walnut and currant work together. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 218 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Currant Jelly and Walnut Filling

Ingredients

1 cup English walnuts, chopped fine (or almonds)
1 cup currant jelly
boiled icing (optional, to taste)

Directions

In a bowl, combine the chopped walnuts and currant jelly.
If the mixture is too tart, add a few tablespoons of boiled icing to sweeten.

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.

Walnut + curranttop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together218 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

English walnuts: Provide crunchy texture and a nutty flavor that contrasts with the filling.
Currant jelly: Supplies the sweetness, tartness and binding body that holds the filling together.
Boiled icing: Adds sweetness to balance a tart mixture, used only if needed.

“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.