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Dessert

Strawberry Jelly

A gelatin dessert made from ripe strawberries, sugar, lemon juice, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the gelatin in the cold water for 2 hours.

  2. Mash the strawberries with the sugar and let them stand for 2 hours.

Make the jelly

  1. Pour the boiling water over the mashed strawberries and sugar.

  2. Press the juice from the strawberries and add it along with the lemon juice to the dissolved gelatin.

  3. Strain the mixture through a cloth, pour into molds, and let it harden.

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

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

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

Ripe strawberries
Provide the main flavour, colour and body of the jelly.
Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and draws juice out of the mashed strawberries.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the strawberry flavour.

The step that matters

Fully dissolve the gelatine before adding the juice. Gelatine only sets when it is completely dissolved in hot liquid. Undissolved granules leave a grainy texture and can produce a weak set, so the gelatine should be fully melted before the strawberry juice and lemon juice are stirred in.

“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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