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Dessert

Nut Jelly

A gelatin dessert made with sugar, lemon juice, almond extract, nuts, and topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 993 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Nut Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Boil 3 pints of water and dissolve 1 box of gelatine in it.

  2. Add 2 cups of sugar and the juice of 3 lemons, then strain the mixture.

  3. Flavor with almond extract.

Set and serve

  1. When the mixture begins to thicken, scatter nuts through it.

  2. Serve with whipped cream.

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. Almond + walnuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  5. Almond + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and balances the tartness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and cuts the sweetness.
English walnuts or cream nuts
Adds crunch and nutty flavor to the soft jelly.

The step that matters

Scattering the nuts as the mixture begins to thicken. Gelatine starts to set as it cools. If the nuts go in too early they sink to the bottom, and if the jelly is already firm they will not distribute through it.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, almond, walnut, cream. 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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