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Dessert

Cider Jelly

A gelatin dessert made with cider, sugar, lemon, 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 ↓

Cider Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in 1 pint of water and let it stand for 20 minutes.

  2. Add 1 pint of boiling water, 1½ pints of cider, 1 pound of sugar, and the juice and rind of 1 lemon.

  3. Boil the mixture.

Cool and strain

  1. Let it cool in a pan of cold water until quite cool.

  2. Strain through flannel.

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).

  2. Cider + lemontop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together986 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Cider + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Cider
Provides the main flavour and most of the liquid in the jelly.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the jelly a clean, smooth body.
Lemon
Its juice adds acidity and its rind adds aroma that brightens the cider.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatine and let it stand. Gelatine must first soak in cold liquid so its granules swell evenly. Heating it while still dry can leave lumps, and undissolved gelatine will not set the jelly properly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, 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.

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