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Dessert

Black Currant Jelly

A sweet preserve made from black currants, water, and sugar, boiled until set.

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 Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the currants

  1. Thoroughly wash and dry the currants.

  2. Strip the currants from the stalks.

  3. Place the currants in a large stew pot.

  4. Add the water to the pot.

  5. Cover the pot with paper.

  6. Place the pot in a cool oven for two hours.

  7. Squeeze the mixture through a fine cloth to extract the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. Add 1.5 pounds of broken loaf sugar for every quart of juice.

  2. Stir gently until the sugar is melted.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil, skimming off any scum that forms.

  4. Boil until the jelly sets.

  5. Test the jelly by dipping a skimmer; it should hang in a drop.

Pot and store

  1. Pour the jelly into pots.

  2. Cover the pots with brandy papers.

  3. Store the pots in a dry place.

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 natural pectin and acid that help the jelly set.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the juice and, once boiled, helps the mixture thicken into a set jelly.
Water
Adds liquid so the currants soften and release their juice during the slow oven stage.

The step that matters

Boil until the jelly sets. Under-boiling leaves the jelly runny, while over-boiling can darken the flavour and make it stiff. The skimmer drop test shows when enough water has evaporated for the sugar and pectin to gel.

“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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