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Dessert

Florida Orange Jelly

A jelly made from Florida oranges, lemons, sugar, water, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Florida Orange Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Grate the yellow rind of two Florida oranges and two lemons.

  2. Squeeze the juice of these fruits into a porcelain-lined preserving kettle. Remove all seeds.

Make the syrup

  1. Add the juice of two more oranges, ¼ pound of sugar, and ½ cup of water.

  2. Boil these ingredients together until a rich syrup forms.

Set the jelly

  1. Dissolve 2 ounces of gelatine in 1 quart of warm water.

  2. Stir over heat until fully dissolved.

  3. Add the syrup to the dissolved gelatine.

  4. Strain the mixture.

  5. Cool the jelly in molds that have been wet in cold water.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and balances the sourness of the citrus juice.
Florida oranges
Provide the main juice flavour and aroma, plus rind for fragrance.
Lemons
Add acidity and aromatic rind oil that brightens the flavour.

The step that matters

Dissolving the gelatine fully. Gelatine must dissolve completely in warm water before mixing with the syrup; undissolved granules leave gritty spots and weak setting in the finished jelly.

“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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