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Dessert

Mango Jelly

A sweet jelly made from green mangoes, sugar, lime water, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mango and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 506 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Mango Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mangoes

  1. Peel and stone the mangoes, then cut them into quarters and place them in lime-water.

  2. Transfer the prepared mangoes to a large pot and cover with cold water.

  3. Boil the mangoes until they dissolve completely.

  4. Strain the liquid without pressing the fruit and let it drip overnight.

Make the jelly

  1. Boil the strained juice in a wide pot, skimming off any scum that rises.

  2. Gradually add white sugar until sweetened.

  3. Continue boiling until the jelly is clear and transparent.

  4. To test, drop some jelly on a plate; if it congeals, remove from heat.

Bottle

  1. Fill bottles with the warm jelly.

  2. Cork the bottles once 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. Mango + limetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together506 recipes

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

  2. Mango + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together561 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + limetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Green mangoes
Provide the fruit pectin and flavour that set the jelly once concentrated.
White sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set by binding water as it thickens.

The step that matters

Testing for set. Jelly keeps thickening as water evaporates and sugar concentrates during boiling. Removing it too late can make it stiff, while removing it too early leaves it runny and unable to set when cool.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mango, 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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