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Bread Jelly, for a Sick Person

Bread jelly is a soothing remedy made by boiling toasted bread slices in water, then sweetening with sugar and lemon peel and adding wine or milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Bread Jelly, for a Sick Person

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Remove the crust from the penny roll and cut the crumb into slices.

  2. Toast the slices on both sides until light brown.

Make the jelly

  1. Boil the quart of water, then let it cool.

  2. Add the toasted bread slices to the cooled water and boil gently until it forms a jelly.

  3. Strain the mixture through a thin cloth and set aside for use.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, warm a tea-cupful of the jelly, add sugar, grated lemon peel, and either wine or milk.

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. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  3. Sugar + winetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

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

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

Penny roll
Toasted bread crumb is boiled into water to thicken it into a jelly.
Water
Serves as the liquid that the bread softens in and forms the jelly.
Lemon peel
Adds fragrant citrus aroma to the finished jelly.
Wine or milk
Adds body and flavour to the warmed jelly at serving time.

The step that matters

Boil the bread in water until it forms a jelly. Bread starch thickens as it gelatinises in hot water and sets as it cools. Boiling too briefly leaves it thin, while boiling too long can break it down into a loose, cloudy mixture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, wine. 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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