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Dessert

Strawberry Jelly

A fruit jelly made from strawberries, sugar, water, and gelatin, optionally flavored with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Prepare 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 1 pint of water to the extracted juice.

  5. Strain the mixture through a clean cloth.

Set the jelly

  1. Measure the juice and dissolve ½ package of gelatin in ¼ cup of water.

  2. Mix the dissolved gelatin with the strawberry juice.

  3. If desired, add 1 teaspoon of lemon juice to enhance the flavor.

  4. Pour the mixture into a mold and set it on ice.

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 main flavour, colour and body of the jelly.
Gelatine
Forms the gel structure that lets the jelly set firm when chilled.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances the tartness of the strawberries.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the strawberry flavour.

The step that matters

Dissolving the gelatine. Gelatine must be fully dissolved before it is mixed into the juice; undissolved granules create cloudy specks and weak patches. It sets only when chilled, so the mixture should be poured into the mold and set on ice.

“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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