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Dessert

Black Currant Jam and Marmalade

A preserve made from black currants, their juice, 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 and Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and drain the black currants if dusty.

Cook the fruit

  1. Boil the currants for 15 to 20 minutes until soft.

  2. Remove half of the currants and press them against the side of the pan to extract juice. Add the extracted juice back to the pan.

Add sugar and thicken

  1. Gradually stir in the sugar until dissolved.

  2. Boil for an additional 10 minutes until thickened.

Cool

  1. Allow to cool; it will firm up as it cools.

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, natural pectin and acidity that let the jam thicken and set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the jam thicken and set while preserving texture.

The step that matters

Boil for an additional 10 minutes until thickened. After the sugar dissolves, the pectin and acid in the currants need enough boiling to concentrate the mixture. Undercooking leaves the jam runny, while overcooking can make it stiff once it cools.

“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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