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Dessert

Orange Jelly

Orange Jelly is a gelatin dessert made with oranges, gelatine, boiling water, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Pare the oranges.

  2. Slice the oranges.

  3. Sprinkle the oranges with a little sugar.

Make the jelly

  1. Soak the gelatine in a little cold water until swollen.

  2. Add the boiling water and lemon juice to the swollen gelatine.

  3. Stir in the sugar until dissolved.

  4. Pour the mixture over the oranges.

  5. Set aside to cool.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Lemon and sugar 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, wobbly jelly as it cools.
Oranges
Provide the main fruit flavour and pieces suspended in the jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and balances the tartness of the citrus.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavour of the orange and sugar.

The step that matters

Soak the gelatine until swollen. Gelatine must hydrate in cold water before it meets hot liquid. Adding it dry or to hot liquid directly can cause clumping and uneven setting, so the jelly may not set smoothly.

“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.

More orange jelly recipes

Seville 17Cake 13Florida 8Baskets 8Lemon 4China 3 See all 328 →

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