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Dessert

Currant Jelly

Currant Jelly is a sweet preserve made from currants, water, sugar, and optional apple juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,918 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the currants

  1. Pick currants before they are fully ripe.

  2. Remove leaves and wash the currants without stemming them.

Extract the juice

  1. Cover the currants with water and cook until soft.

  2. Strain the mixture as you would for apple jelly.

Make the jelly

  1. Use equal parts of the juice and sugar, and boil the mixture like apple jelly.

  2. For a milder flavor, add a little apple juice to the mixture.

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 + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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 fruit flavor, natural pectin and tartness that set the jelly.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with the juice, helps the jelly set when boiled.
Apple juice
Mildens the flavor of the jelly and adds a little extra fruit liquid.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice and sugar together. The mixture must reach a full rolling boil with the sugar so the pectin and acid can gel properly. Undercooking leaves the jelly runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and sugary.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (currant, sugar):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Red currantfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

More currant jelly recipes

Red 93Black 55Sauce 50White 38French 11Tartlets 7 See all 365 →

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