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Dessert

Black Currant Jam

Jam made from black currants and sugar, cooked until thickened.

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 Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove stems from black currants.

  2. Heat currants gently until they release juice.

Cook and cool

  1. Once sugar is dissolved, boil mixture rapidly for 15 minutes.

  2. Allow jam to cool; it will thicken as it cools.

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, juice, and natural pectin and acid that help the jam set and give it flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, helps preserve the jam, and works with pectin and acid to help it gel.

The step that matters

Boil rapidly for 15 minutes. The sugar must be fully dissolved first. A rapid boil concentrates the sugar and lets pectin and acid form a gel as the jam cools. Boiling too briefly leaves the jam runny.

“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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