Skip to main content
Dessert

Seville Orange Jelly

A clear jelly made from Seville orange juice, lemon rinds, sugar, water, egg whites, and flavored with cherry wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Seville Orange Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Squeeze the juice from the Seville oranges and filter the orange juice through blotting paper.

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve one pound of sugar in ½ cup of water.

  2. Add the rinds and juice of three lemons and the whites of five eggs to the sugar mixture, and whisk until the sugar is dissolved.

  3. Add the filtered orange juice to the mixture.

Cook and clarify

  1. Place the mixture on the fire, whisking until it boils, then remove from heat.

  2. Strain through a jelly bag until clear.

  3. Flavor with cherry wine or your choice of flavoring.

Set

  1. Pour into molds or glasses.

  2. Set in ice.

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. Orange + cherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together689 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Lemon + cherrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,301 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon 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

Seville oranges
Provide the main juice, giving the jelly its tart, bitter-citrus flavor and aroma.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with the cooked juice, helps the mixture set into a firm jelly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and supports the jelly's setting.
Lemon rinds
Add aromatic oils and natural pectin that help the jelly set.
Egg whites
Coagulate when heated and trap cloudy particles, so straining leaves the jelly clear.

The step that matters

Strain through a jelly bag until clear. Egg white proteins coagulate as the mixture boils and trap cloudy particles. Straining slowly through the bag removes them, so rushing this step leaves the jelly cloudy.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar, lemon, egg. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes