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Crushed Fruits for Soda Water

A fruit syrup made by crushing fruit, sweetening with sugar and tartaric acid, thickening with gelatin, and preserving with preservative.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and gelatin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,778 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Crushed Fruits for Soda Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Prepare the fruit by peeling and pitting it.

  2. Pass the fruit through a meat chopper with medium-sized holes.

Make the crush

  1. In a kettle, combine the fruit with 10 lbs of sugar and 1 oz of tartaric acid.

  2. Heat the mixture to 190°F (88°C) and stir until the sugar dissolves.

  3. Soak 2 oz of Japanese gelatin in cold water for 6 hours, then dissolve it in a little heat.

  4. Add the dissolved gelatin to the fruit mixture and stir well.

  5. Add coloring to achieve the desired shade.

  6. For preservation, add 1.6 oz of preservative for every 10 lbs of the product.

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 + gelatintop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and body, and helps preserve the fruit by binding water.
Tartaric acid
Adds acidity that brightens the fruit flavor and balances the sweetness.
Japanese gelatin
Sets and thickens the crush, giving it a spreadable, body-rich texture.

The step that matters

Dissolving the gelatin fully before adding it. Gelatin must be completely dissolved, not lumpy, to set evenly. Undissolved granules stay as clumps and give an uneven texture once the mixture cools.

“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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