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Tomato Jelly for Salad

A gelatinous tomato mixture made with tomatoes, cloves, onion, bay leaf, thyme, sugar, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 4,108 recipes mention both. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Tomato Jelly for Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the jelly

  1. Soak the gelatin in the cold water.

  2. Boil the tomatoes, cloves, onion, salt, bay leaf, thyme, sugar, and pepper together.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

  4. For a clear jelly, let it drip through a cheesecloth bag.

  5. Add the strained gelatin and set aside to congeal.

Serve

  1. Serve with mayonnaise and lettuce.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Tomato + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main flavour and liquid base that the jelly sets from.
Gelatin
Sets the strained tomato liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.

The step that matters

Soak the gelatin in the cold water. Gelatin must first hydrate in cold liquid so it dissolves evenly later; adding it dry or to hot liquid can leave lumps and weak setting.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, clove, thyme, pepper, gelatin, sugar):

  1. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  2. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  3. Sweet potatobetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, clove, thyme, pepper, gelatin, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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