Skip to main content
Main

Pork Jelly

A gelatinous dish made by boiling pig's feet and ears until the meat separates, then thickening the broth into jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sage and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,445 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Pork Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Salt the pig's feet and ears for 2-3 days.

  2. Place them in a saucepan and cover with water.

  3. Boil quickly for several hours until the meat separates from the bones.

Make the gelatin

  1. Remove the meat, discard the bones, and chop the meat into very small pieces.

  2. Return the chopped meat to the saucepan and add pepper.

  3. If desired, add finely chopped mace, sage, and parsley just before the end of cooking.

  4. Boil slowly until the mixture thickens and becomes jelly-like.

Set and chill

  1. Pour into a mold and refrigerate until cold.

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. Sage + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,445 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  4. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Mace + sagetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together519 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pig's feet
Release collagen that dissolves into broth and sets into a firm, jelly-like gel.
Pig's ears
Add more collagen and body, helping the mixture gel as it cools.

The step that matters

Boil slowly until the mixture thickens. Collagen from the bones and connective tissue must dissolve fully into the liquid. A gentle simmer extracts it without breaking the broth cloudy, and too little reduction leaves the gel too soft to set.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, sage, parsley):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sage, parsley. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes