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Red Currant Jelly

A preserve made by boiling red and white currants with sugar to form a jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Red Currant Jelly

Why it works: Red currant and white currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Red Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Strip the red currants from their stalks and mix with the white currants.

  2. Place the currants in a clean preserving pan and stir over medium heat until the juice flows freely.

  3. Drain the juice through a fine sieve without pressure, then pass it through a muslin or jelly bag.

  4. Weigh the juice and boil it rapidly for 15 minutes.

Make the jelly

  1. Add 8 oz of sugar for each pound of juice, stirring off the heat until dissolved.

  2. Boil the jelly for an additional 8 minutes, skimming off any scum that rises.

  3. Pour the jelly into jars and let it cool.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + white curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

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

  3. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the main tart flavour and the natural pectin and acid that help the jelly set.
White currants
Add extra juice and mild acidity, balancing the flavour of the red currants.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, with the acid and pectin, helps it set firm.

The step that matters

Boil the juice rapidly before adding sugar. Boiling the juice first concentrates it and activates the natural pectin. Adding sugar only after this lets the jelly reach the setting point reliably.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red currant, sugar. 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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