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Dessert

Strawberry Jelly

A gelatin set dessert made from strawberries, sugar, water, and gelatine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Pick the strawberries and place them in a pan.

  2. Squeeze the strawberries with a wooden spoon to extract the juice.

  3. Add enough pounded sugar to sweeten the strawberries and let them sit for 1 hour.

  4. Add ½ cup of water for every pint of juice extracted.

Strain and set

  1. Strain the strawberry juice and water through a clean cloth.

  2. Dissolve half a package of gelatine in ½ cup of water and mix it with the juice.

  3. Pour the mixture into a mold and set it on ice to chill until set.

  4. If desired, add lemon juice to enhance the flavor before straining.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Strawberries
Provide the juice, flavor and color that make up the jelly.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances its tartness.
Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly as it chills.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatine fully before mixing it with the juice. Undissolved gelatine granules form specks and weak spots, so the jelly sets unevenly. Fully dissolved gelatine spreads through the liquid and gels evenly as it chills.

“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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