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Jams and Jellies

A method for making fruit jams and jellies by cooking fruit with water and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Jams and Jellies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Prepare the fruit by peeling, coring, and slicing as needed.

  2. Cook the prepared fruit with enough water to boil.

Make the jam or jelly

  1. Add sugar in a ratio of 1:1 or 1:2 (sugar to fruit) based on preference.

  2. For jelly, cook the fruit in a small amount of water until soft.

  3. Transfer the cooked fruit to a bag or press to extract the juice.

  4. Evaporate the juice with added sugar until it reaches a density of 300 to 320 B6.

Store

  1. Pour the hot mixture into tumblers for storage.

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. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Fruit
Provides the pectin, acid and flavour that give the jam or jelly its body and taste.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it set and keep by binding water.

The step that matters

Evaporating the juice to the target density. Cooking too little leaves the preserve runny, while cooking too long can scorch the sugar and darken the flavour. The sugar concentration must reach the density where the mixture sets when cool.

“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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