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Dessert

Canned Currants

A preserved fruit dish made by boiling currants with sugar and sealing in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Sugar and currant 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 ↓

Canned Currants

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the currants by washing them thoroughly.

  2. Add enough sugar to sweeten the currants to your taste.

Cook and seal

  1. Boil the currants for 10 minutes.

  2. Seal the jars while the mixture is still hot.

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. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant 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 main fruit flavor and natural pectin that helps the mixture thicken as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, balances the currants' tartness, and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Seal the jars while the mixture is still hot. Sealing while the mixture is hot lets the contents and jar cool together, so the air trapped above the fruit contracts and draws the lid down to form a seal.

“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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