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Dessert

Bed Currant Jelly

A jelly made from ripe red and white currants with coarse sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and white currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Bed Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Strip the currants from the stalks and mix the red and white currants in a clean preserving pan.

  2. Stir gently over medium heat until the juice flows freely.

  3. Drain the juice through a jelly bag without pressure.

Make the jelly

  1. Weigh the juice and boil it for 15 minutes.

  2. Add 8 oz of sugar for each pound of juice and stir until dissolved.

  3. Boil the jelly for an additional 8 minutes, skimming off any scum that rises.

Jar

  1. Pour the jelly into jars and let it cool.

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. Red currant + white curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide natural pectin and acidity, which help the jelly set and give it a bright flavor.
White currants
Add tartness and pectin, balancing the flavor of the red currants.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, with pectin and acid, helps it set and keeps it stable.

The step that matters

Boil the jelly for an additional 8 minutes after adding sugar. Pectin, sugar and acid must reach a high enough concentration to form a gel. Boiling too briefly can leave the jelly runny, while boiling too long can make it stiff and dull in flavor.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red currant, sugar. 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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