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Dessert

Currant Jelly

A jelly made from red and white currants or raspberries, sugar, and boiled juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Currant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick over the currants, removing leaves and poor fruit.

  2. Wash and drain the currants if dirty, but do not stem them.

  3. Mash the currants in a porcelain kettle with a wooden pestle without heating.

  4. Let the mashed currants drain in a flannel bag overnight without squeezing.

  5. In the morning, measure one bowl of sugar for each bowl of juice.

Make the jelly

  1. Heat the sugar in an earthen dish in the oven, stirring often to prevent burning.

  2. Boil the juice for twenty minutes.

  3. Skim the juice thoroughly.

  4. Add the hot sugar to the juice and boil for 3 to 5 minutes until it thickens on a spoon.

Set and seal

  1. Turn the jelly into glasses and let them sit in the sun for several days.

  2. Cover with paper dipped in brandy and paste paper over the tops of the glasses.

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 + 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
Their natural pectin and acidity give the jelly its set and tart flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, boiled with the juice, helps it thicken and set.

The step that matters

Add the hot sugar and boil until it thickens on a spoon. Currant juice holds natural pectin, which sets only when enough sugar is boiled in and the mixture reaches gel point. Undercooking leaves the jelly runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull.

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.

More currant jelly recipes

Red 93Black 55Sauce 50White 38French 11Tartlets 7 See all 365 →

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