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Dessert

Currants Sweetmeats

A preserved sweetmeat made from currants and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and black currant 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 ↓

Currants Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pick over the fruit, removing stems and leaves.

  2. Weigh the fruit and place it in a china-lined kettle.

Cook and set

  1. Warm the fruit slowly and stew gently for 20 to 30 minutes.

  2. Add the sugar and mix carefully without mashing.

  3. Once the sugar is dissolved, fill jars quickly, cover, and set aside.

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

Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as it dissolves, helps the mixture thicken and set into a preserve.
Currants
Provide the fruit body, tartness and natural pectin that give the sweetmeats their structure.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar without mashing. Stirring gently keeps the fruit pieces whole while the sugar dissolves. Vigorous mixing breaks the fruit down, changing the texture and releasing more pectin than the set needs.

“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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