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Dessert

Currant and Raspberries Sweetmeat

A preserve made from currants, raspberries, sugar, and bread, boiled and jarred.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and bread work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 84 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Currant and Raspberries Sweetmeat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine equal weights of red currants and raspberries in a bowl.

  2. Add ¾ pound of sugar to the fruit and cover it overnight.

Cook and store

  1. The next day, boil the mixture slowly for 1 hour, skimming if necessary.

  2. Pour the sweetmeat into small jars while hot and seal with wax paper or brandy paper.

  3. Store in a cool place; it will keep well.

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 + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together84 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  3. Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it, drawing out juice and thickening the mixture as it cooks.
Red currants
Provide tart acidity and natural pectin that help the sweetmeat set.
Raspberries
Add fruity aroma and flavor, balancing the tartness of the currants.

The step that matters

Slow boil with skimming. Boiling slowly for the full hour evaporates water and concentrates sugar and fruit pectin so the mixture sets. Skimming removes foam and impurities that can cloud the sweetmeat or spoil it during storage.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, bread. 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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