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Dessert

Black Currant Jam

A jam made from black currants, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 the fruit

  1. Wash the currants and place them in a kettle.

  2. Add an equal quantity of water.

  3. Cook until the currants are tender, then weigh the mixture.

Make the jam

  1. For every pound of fruit and juice, add 1 pound of sugar.

  2. Cook for an additional 10 minutes.

  3. Pour the jam into sterile bottles and seal.

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 flavor, natural pectin and acidity that help the jam set.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and, at high concentration, helps preserve it and set the gel.

The step that matters

Weigh the fruit and juice, then add sugar in equal weight. Sugar must reach a high concentration, roughly two-thirds of the total, for pectin and acid to form a firm gel and for the jam to keep. Measuring by weight keeps the ratio correct, and too little sugar or too short a cook can leave the jam runny or spoil-prone.

“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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