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Trench Currant Jelly

A jelly made from white and red currants with sugar and currant juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Trench Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Mix the white and red currants in a pot over gentle heat until they release their juice.

  2. Strain the mixture and weigh the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. For every 4 lbs of juice, break 3 lbs of sugar into large lumps and dip them in cold water.

  2. Boil the sugar until it forms a thick syrup, stirring constantly until it falls in large white masses from the skimmer.

  3. Pour the currant juice into the syrup and boil quickly for 5 minutes.

  4. Skim off any scum and pour the jelly into jars or warm glasses.

  5. Set the jars in a cool place to set.

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 + curranttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. White currant + curranttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together0 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. White currant + red curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

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

  5. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant 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

Red currants
Provide most of the juice and the pectin that lets the jelly set.
White currants
Add juice and mild flavour while contributing to the jelly's clear, pale colour.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, with the acid and pectin, helps it set firm.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to a thick syrup. Sugar must be cooked until it reaches a thick syrup stage before the juice is added. Undercooked syrup leaves the jelly runny, while overcooking can make it grainy or caramelised.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. White currantthe original
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Plumfits about as well

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

More currant jelly recipes

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

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