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Preserve

Jams and Jellies

A method for making fruit preserves using fruit, sugar, water, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and gelatin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,778 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Jams and Jellies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pick fruit when just ripened and remove stems.

  2. Place fruit in a porcelain-lined kettle or a bright brass/tin kettle.

  3. Crush a little fruit and add all to the kettle without water.

Extract the juice

  1. Heat the mixture and mash with a potato masher.

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

Sweeten and cook

  1. For every pint of juice, add 1 pound of sugar.

  2. Boil the juice for 25 minutes, then add sugar and boil for 5 more minutes.

Store

  1. Pour into glasses to store.

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. Sugar + gelatintop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  3. Currant + gelatintop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together33 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

Fruit
Provides the flavor, natural pectin and acid that help the juice set.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and, with boiling, helps the juice thicken into a gel.
Gelatin
Sets the juice into a firm gel where cherries are used, since cherries lack enough pectin.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice with sugar. Boiling concentrates the juice so the sugar, pectin and acid can set. Too little boiling leaves the jam runny, while boiling too long can darken the flavor and make the set stiff.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, gelatin. 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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