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
The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Prepare the juice
Strip the currants from the stalks and place them in a jar.
Add 1 pint of water for every gallon of currants.
Heat in an oven at 300°F (150°C) for 3 hours.
Squeeze the mixture through a cloth to extract all the juice.
Make the jelly
For every pint of juice, add 1 pound of sugar and stir gently until dissolved.
Bring to a boil, skimming off any scum.
Boil for 20 minutes.
Pour into pots and cover with brandy papers.
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.
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Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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 flavour, natural pectin and acidity that give the jelly its set and tang.
- Water
- Adds moisture so the currants soften and release their juice during the slow heating.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the juice and, once boiled, helps the mixture thicken and set into jelly.
The step that matters
Boil for 20 minutes after adding the sugar. Boiling the juice and sugar together concentrates the mixture and drives off water so it reaches the pectin and sugar level needed to set. Too short a boil leaves a runny jelly, while overboiling can darken the flavour and weaken the 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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