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Currants Preserved

Currants preserved in a sugar syrup by boiling and reboiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

Currants Preserved

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash a few currants at a time until all are done.

Make the preserve

  1. For every pound of currants, add one pound of sugar to the juice.

  2. Boil the mixture for a few minutes.

  3. Return the currants to the syrup and boil them once more.

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 fruit, juice and pectin that set the preserve and give its tart flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved into the juice, thickens it into a syrup that preserves the currants.

The step that matters

Boiling the currants in the syrup. Boiling concentrates the sugar and fruit juice until the syrup thickens. Undercooking leaves a thin liquid that spoils easily, while overcooking can make the currants tough and the syrup too stiff.

“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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