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Dessert

Black Currant Jelly

A preserved fruit spread made from black currants, sugar, and brandy paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and brandy work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Black Currant Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Gather black currants on a dry day and strip them from the stalks.

  2. Put the currants into a large pot and add 1 quart of water for every 10 quarts of currants.

  3. Cover with paper and place in a cool oven for 2 hours.

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

Make the jelly

  1. Add 1.5 pounds of broken loaf sugar to each quart of juice and stir gently until dissolved.

  2. Bring to a boil, skimming off any foam, and boil quickly for 30 minutes.

Pot and cover

  1. Pour into pots and cover with brandy paper.

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 + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Black currants
Provide the fruit flavour, natural pectin and acidity that help the juice set into jelly.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness, helps the jelly set, and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Boil quickly for 30 minutes. Rapid boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar, pectin and acid so the juice can reach a gel. Too little boiling leaves the jelly runny and less likely to keep.

Swap the black currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, brandy):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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