Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange and Lemon Jellies

A jelly made from orange or lemon skins and juice, sweetened with sugar.

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

Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange and Lemon Jellies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pectin

  1. Remove the yellow outer skin of the oranges or lemons.

  2. Take the white inner skin and chop it finely.

  3. Soak the chopped skin overnight in enough water to cover it.

  4. Cook the soaked skin on the stove for a couple of hours and then strain.

Make the jelly

  1. Add the juice of the fruit to the strained liquid.

  2. Measure the juice and add about ¾ cup of sugar for each cup of juice.

  3. Cook the mixture until it thickens into jelly.

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 + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

White inner skin (in the method)
Contains natural pectin, which sets the liquid into a jelly as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the jelly thicken and hold its set.
Fruit juice (in the method)
Provides the main flavour and acidity that helps pectin set.

The step that matters

Cooking the mixture until it thickens. Pectin sets only when enough sugar and acid are present and the liquid reaches the right concentration. Cooking too briefly leaves it runny; cooking too long can make it stiff.

“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 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes