Skip to main content
Dessert

Fine Jelly

A jelly made from red currant juice, strawberry juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Red currant and strawberry work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 83 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Fine Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the red currant juice and strawberry juice together.

  2. Add an equal amount of sugar to the juice mixture.

  3. Boil the mixture until it reaches the desired consistency.

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. Red currant + strawberrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together83 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Strawberry + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,060 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Red currant juice
Provides tartness and natural pectin, which helps the jelly set firm.
Strawberry juice
Adds fruity flavour and colour to the jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly, balances the tartness, and helps it set.

The step that matters

Boil until the desired consistency. Sugar and pectin only gel when the mixture reaches the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves the jelly runny, while boiling too long can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against strawberry, sugar. 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

Strawberry Ice CreamStrawberry Ice Cream122 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesStrawberry SherbetStrawberry Sherbet48 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipes