Name: Currant Jelly Without Cooking
Ingredients: 1 pint currant juice; 1 pound fine white sugar

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 Without Cooking

Ingredients

1 pint currant juice
1 pound fine white sugar

Directions

Prepare

Press the juice from the currants and strain it.
Mix the currant juice with the sugar until dissolved.

Set and store

Pour the mixture into jars and seal them.
Expose the jars to hot sun for 2 to 3 days.

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.

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

Currant juice: Provides the main liquid and the tart fruit flavour that the jelly is built on.
Fine white sugar: Sweetens the jelly and, with the fruit pectin, helps it set and keep.

“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.