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Dessert

Guava Jelly

A sweet, clear jelly made from guavas, sugar, and lime juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Guava and lime share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Guava Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Peel and quarter the guavas, then place them in a large vessel of clean water.

  2. Remove the guavas and boil them in enough clean water to cover the fruit until soft.

  3. Strain the mixture through a towel without pressing the fruit, allowing it to drip for 12 to 24 hours.

Make the jelly

  1. Return the juice to the heat in an open vessel, boil and skim well.

  2. Add sugar to taste and lime juice, using the juice of 10 limes for every 100 guavas.

  3. When no more scum rises and the jelly is clear, pour it warm into glass or stone jars and seal when 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. Guava + limetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Guava + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together115 recipes

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

  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

Guavas
Provide the fruit flesh and natural pectin that help the juice set into a jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set by binding water and thickening the juice.
Limes
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and supports pectin setting.

The step that matters

Skimming the boiling juice. Scum rising during boiling can cloud the jelly and affect its clarity. Removing it thoroughly while boiling keeps the finished jelly clear, and the jelly is ready only when no more scum forms.

Swap the lime

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against guava, 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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