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Currant Jelly

A sweet preserve made from currants and sugar boiled into jelly.

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 ↓

Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Remove stems from currants and place them in a stone jar.

  2. Bruise the currants with a wooden spoon and warm them.

  3. Squeeze the mixture through a coarse cloth or flannel.

  4. Pour the juice into a new tin pan or porcelain kettle.

Make the jelly

  1. Add 2 pounds of sugar for every quart of juice.

  2. Boil for 15 minutes.

  3. Use new and bright iron spoons or tin dishes to avoid discoloration.

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 juice, natural acidity and pectin that let the jelly set.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it set into a firm, spreadable gel.

The step that matters

Boil for 15 minutes. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar and pectin so the mixture can gel as it cools. Boiling too briefly leaves the jelly runny, while overcooking can darken the color and make it 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.

More currant jelly recipes

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

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