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Dessert

Currant Jelly

Currant jelly made by crushing ripe currants, straining, and cooking with sugar until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick currants when just ripened and remove stems.

  2. Place currants in a porcelain-lined kettle and crush slightly to release juice.

Extract the juice

  1. Heat the mixture, mashing it with a potato masher until hot.

  2. Strain the mixture through a jelly bag, allowing it to run off before squeezing.

Make the jelly

  1. Add sugar to the juice, 1 pound per pint, ensuring no blue tinge.

  2. Boil the juice for 25 minutes.

  3. Add the sugar.

  4. Boil for an additional 5 minutes.

Store

  1. Pour the jelly into glasses for storage.

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. 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

Currants
Provide the fruit juice, flavor and natural pectin that help the jelly set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, when boiled with the juice, helps the mixture thicken and set.

The step that matters

Boil the juice for 25 minutes. Boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugar and pectin in the juice. If the juice is not boiled long enough, the jelly may stay runny instead of setting firmly.

“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

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