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Dessert

Preserved Currants for Puddings

Preserved currants are currants boiled in brown sugar, cooled, and stored with a brandy-soaked paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and currant 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 ↓

Preserved Currants for Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick over and wash the currants.

  2. In a pot, combine the brown sugar and currants.

Cook and jar

  1. Bring the mixture to a boil, then pour it into a jar.

Seal and store

  1. Wet a piece of paper with brandy and place it on top of the jar when cool.

  2. Cover the jar tightly and store it in a cool place, or spread the currants on plates to dry.

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. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant 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 main fruit flavour and bulk, and natural pectin that helps the mixture thicken.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration, helps preserve it by reducing free water.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Boiling dissolves the sugar fully and drives off water, raising the sugar concentration. That concentration is what helps keep the preserved currants from spoiling in the jar.

“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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