Name: Preserving and Jelly Making
Ingredients: 1 quart large fruit; 1 pint syrup (1 pint sugar + 1 pint water); ⅔ pint syrup (for 1 quart small fruits); 1 pint sugar; 2 pints water (for light syrup)

Why it works: Syrup and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Preserving and Jelly Making

Ingredients

1 quart large fruit
1 pint syrup (1 pint sugar + 1 pint water)
⅔ pint syrup (for 1 quart small fruits)
1 pint sugar
2 pints water (for light syrup)

Directions

Prepare

Sterilize jars and utensils before starting.

Make the syrup

For large fruits, mix 1 pint of sugar with 1 pint of water in a kettle, stir until sugar dissolves, then bring to a boil and boil for 5 minutes.
For small fruits, use ⅔ pint of syrup for each quart.
For a light syrup, boil 1 pint of sugar with 2 pints of water for 10 minutes.

Finish

Canning can be done similarly for blueberries, raspberries, cherries, and currants.

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.

Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,842 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar: Dissolves into the water to form the syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps preserve its shape.
Water: Dissolves the sugar to form the syrup that covers and holds the fruit.

“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.