Skip to main content
Main

Clarification of Meat Jelly with Eggs

A method to clarify meat jelly by adding egg whites and water, then boiling and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Meat and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,432 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Clarification of Meat Jelly with Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Clarify the jelly

  1. Remove all fat and foam from the jelly.

  2. Add a little vinegar to the jelly to make it slightly acidic.

  3. For each quart of jelly, take 3 egg whites and 1 ounce of water per egg white.

Fine the jelly

  1. Beat the egg whites and water thoroughly.

  2. Pour the mixture into the jelly and stir gently.

  3. Turn on the steam and bring to a boil.

  4. Once boiling, turn off the steam and strain the hot jelly through a wet fabric or flannel.

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. Meat + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Meat + vinegartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,428 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methylbutanol (malty, whiskey).

  3. Egg + vinegartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and vinegar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,922 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

Meat jelly
Forms the body of the dish and sets as it cools.
Egg whites
Coagulate when heated and trap impurities, clarifying the jelly.
Water
Dilutes the egg whites so they mix evenly into the jelly.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture into the jelly and stir gently. Stirring too hard breaks up the beaten egg whites before they can coagulate. Gentle stirring keeps them distributed so they can gather impurities as the jelly heats and clarifies.

“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.

You might also like

Meat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipesMince MeatMince Meat37 recipesMeat CakesMeat Cakes35 recipes