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Dessert

Black Currant Paste

A thick paste made by mashing black currants, adding sugar, and simmering until it thickens.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Mash the currants in a bowl or marble mortar without bruising the seeds.

  2. Put the mashed currants into a saucepan and heat nearly to boiling.

  3. Rub the mixture through a sieve to separate the seeds.

Make the paste

  1. Add 1½ pounds of loaf sugar to the pulpy juice.

  2. Simmer the mixture gently, stirring constantly to prevent burning.

  3. Continue simmering until the mixture thickens to a stiff paste, testing with a teaspoon on a cold plate.

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 pulp, juice and natural pectin that set the paste.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the paste and, as it cooks down, thickens it into a firm, sliceable set.

The step that matters

Simmering until stiff. Sugar and fruit pectin set only when enough water has evaporated and the sugar concentration is high. Stirring constantly prevents the sugar from scorching on the pan base, which would give a bitter flavour. Testing on a cold plate shows whether the paste has reached a firm 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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