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Dessert

Black Currant Jam

A jam made from red currant juice, pounded loaf sugar, and black currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and black currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 72 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Black Currant Jam

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the red currant juice and pounded sugar together for 15 minutes after it starts to bubble, stirring well.

  2. Add the black currants and continue to boil until the mixture thickens.

  3. Pour the jam into jars and seal tightly.

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. Red currant + black curranttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together72 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + black curranttop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

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

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Pounded loaf sugar
Sweetens the jam and, as it dissolves and concentrates, helps it set and thicken.
Red currant juice
Supplies liquid and natural pectin and acidity that help the jam gel.
Black currants
Add fruit body, flavour and additional pectin to the jam.

The step that matters

Boiling until the jam thickens. Jam sets only when enough water evaporates and sugar concentrates, so stopping too early leaves it runny, while over-boiling can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, black currant):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Red currantthe original
  3. Blueberryfits less well
  4. Raspberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, black currant. 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.

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