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Dessert

Peach Jelly

A preserve made from peaches, peach kernels, water, lemon, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Peach Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel peaches and remove stones.

  2. Slice peaches and add ¼ cup kernels.

  3. Place peaches and kernels in kettle and cover with water.

  4. Stir often until fruit is well cooked.

  5. Strain mixture and measure juice.

Make the jelly

  1. For every pint of juice, add juice of 1 lemon.

  2. For each pint of juice, add 1 pound sugar.

  3. Heat sugar until very hot.

  4. Add hot sugar to juice and boil for 20 minutes.

  5. Let it come to a boil and then remove from heat.

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. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

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

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

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

Peaches
Provide the fruit flavour and natural pectin-bearing pulp that give the jelly its body.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, with boiling, helps it set into a firm gel.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and supports pectin setting.

The step that matters

Add hot sugar to juice and boil for 20 minutes. Sugar must be heated before adding so the mixture stays at a rolling boil. Sustained boiling concentrates the sugar and pectin so the jelly can set properly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, 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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