Skip to main content
Dessert

Currant Jelly

Currant jelly made by jamming currants, adding sugar, boiling, and setting into jars on a wet towel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Jam and strain the currants.

  2. Add 1 pound of sugar to each pint of currant juice.

  3. Boil the juice for 15 minutes without sugar.

  4. Strain the mixture into glasses.

Pour into jars

  1. Wet a towel with cold water and place it on the table before pouring hot jelly into jars.

  2. Set the cold jars on the towel and pour the boiling jelly into them.

  3. Do not place two jars on the same spot without first wetting the towel.

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 and natural pectin that help the jelly set.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps the jelly set as it cooks.

The step that matters

Pouring boiling jelly into cold jars. Sudden temperature change can crack glass when boiling liquid meets a cold jar. Setting the jars on a damp towel cushions them and helps them cool more gently, so the jars are less likely to break.

“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