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Dessert

Mint and Apple Jelly

A jelly made from green apples and fresh mint, sweetened with sugar and colored green.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Mint and Apple Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Wash and quarter the apples.

  2. Cover the apples with cold water and bring to a boil.

  3. Add ⅓ of the mint to the boiling apples.

  4. When the apples are soft, strain the mixture through a sieve onto the bruised mint.

  5. Once cool, strain through a jelly bag.

Finish the jelly

  1. Add nearly as much sugar as the juice and 1 drop of green food coloring.

  2. Proceed as you would with any jelly.

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. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Apple + minttop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together203 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Mint + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,592 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Green apples
Provide pectin and acid, which help the jelly set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with pectin and acid, helps the jelly gel.
Fresh mint
Adds aroma and fresh minty flavor to the juice.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar to the juice. Sugar, pectin and acid must reach the right balance to gel. Too little sugar or insufficient boiling can leave the jelly runny, while overcooking can make it stiff or cloudy.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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