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Currant Jelly

Currant jelly is made by boiling currants and sugar until the mixture congeals.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Strip the currants from the stalks and place them in a stone jar.

  2. Set the jar in a vessel of boiling water, stirring occasionally until the currants are broken.

  3. Squeeze the mixture through a coarse cloth to extract the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. In a porcelain kettle, combine the juice with the sugar, stirring frequently.

  2. Skim the mixture before it boils.

  3. Boil for about 20 minutes until it congeals on a spoon.

  4. Pour the jelly into hot glasses.

  5. Seal the glasses when 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. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants
Provide the natural pectin and acidity that let the juice set into a firm jelly.
Refined sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it set by binding water and concentrating the pectin.

The step that matters

Boil until it congeals on a spoon. Pectin, acid and sugar only gel at the right concentration. Under-boiling leaves a runny jelly, while over-boiling can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

“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.

More currant jelly recipes

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