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Currant Jelly

Currant jelly is made by boiling currants with water, straining, and adding sugar to set.

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

Prepare the currants

  1. Pick out leaves and debris from the currants, leaving them on their stems.

  2. Weigh the currants accurately.

  3. In a preserving kettle, add 1 pint of water and a bowl or two of currants, mashing them to extract juice.

  4. Add the remaining currants to the kettle.

  5. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  6. Boil for at least 20 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent burning.

Strain the juice

  1. Prepare a three-cornered bag from thin, strong unbleached cotton.

  2. Scald the bag.

  3. Wring the bag until almost dry.

  4. Hang the bag.

  5. Pour the boiled currants into the bag.

  6. Allow the mixture to drip into a stone crock overnight without squeezing.

  7. In the morning, pour the strained juice into the preserving kettle.

Make the jelly

  1. Bring the juice to a boil.

  2. Boil for 3-4 minutes.

  3. Add sugar equal to half the weight of the currants.

  4. Heat the sugar while the juice boils.

  5. Once the sugar is fully dissolved, the jelly is done.

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 pectin, acidity and flavour that set and taste the jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set by binding water and firming the gel.

The step that matters

Boiling the currants before straining. Boiling breaks down the currant skins and softens the fruit so pectin and juice are released. Insufficient boiling leaves the juice weak, so the jelly may fail to set.

“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

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