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Dessert

Black Currant Lozenges

A sweet confection made from black currant juice and brown sugar, formed into lozenges.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 Lozenges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Put 6 quarts of clean-picked black currants into a saucepan.

  2. Bruise the currants with your hand until the heat allows.

  3. Squeeze the currants through a sieve to extract the juice.

  4. For every pint of juice, add 4 ounces of brown sugar.

Make and dry the lozenges

  1. Boil and stir the mixture for 45 minutes.

  2. Pour the mixture thinly over saucers or small plates.

  3. Dry the lozenges for three consecutive days near the fire.

  4. Cut the dried mixture into small dice or use a turnip scoop.

  5. Store the lozenges on white paper in a box.

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. Black currant + sugartop 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

Black currants
Provide the fruit flavour and the pectin and acid that help the mixture set.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the mixture and, as it boils down, thickens it into a firm, chewy lozenge.

The step that matters

Boil and stir the mixture for 45 minutes. Boiling drives off water and concentrates the sugar and fruit pectin. Stirring prevents scorching on the base of the pan. Too little boiling leaves the lozenges soft and sticky, and too much can make them hard and brittle.

“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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