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Dessert

Black Currant Jelly

A preserved jelly made from black currants and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Black Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Remove the stalks from the black currants.

  2. Place the currants in a jar and set it in a saucepan of boiling water.

  3. Simmer until the juice is extracted.

  4. Strain the juice into a preserving pan.

Make the jelly

  1. Add 1 ½ cups of sugar for each pint of juice.

  2. Boil gently until the jelly stiffens.

  3. Test the jelly by placing a little on a cold plate.

  4. Pour the jelly into small pots.

Seal and store

  1. Cover the pots with paper brushed with egg white.

  2. Fasten the paper securely to exclude air.

  3. Store the pots in a cool, dry place.

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. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants
Provide the fruit juice that gives the jelly its flavour and natural pectin.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set by binding water and firming the gel.

The step that matters

Boil gently until the jelly stiffens. Boiling too hard or too long can break down pectin and burn the sugar, while too little boiling leaves the jelly runny. Testing on a cold plate shows when it has reached a 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.

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