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Dessert

Peach Jelly

Peach jelly made from sliced peaches, peach kernels, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Peach Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel and slice the peaches.

  2. Crack the peach kernels and add them to a jar with the peaches.

  3. Heat the jar in a dishpan of boiling water, stirring occasionally until it reaches a mushy consistency.

  4. Strain the mixture through a bag.

Make the jelly

  1. Add the juice of one lemon for every pint of juice.

  2. Measure the juice again and add 1 pint of sugar for each pint of juice.

  3. Boil each pint of juice, adding sugar when it starts to boil, and boil hard for 5 minutes.

  4. Fill glasses immediately with the jelly.

Seal and label

  1. Once cooled, dip tissue or fine note-paper in egg white and place it on top of each glass, cutting around the edges with scissors.

  2. Cover the glasses or tie them with sturdy paper and label each one.

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. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches
Provide the fruit flavor and the pectin-rich pulp that lets the juice set into jelly.
Sugar
Sets the gel with the pectin and adds sweetness and preservation.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that helps the pectin set and brightens the peach flavor.
Peach kernels
Add a subtle almond-like aroma to the jelly.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice hard for 5 minutes. Sugar and pectin only form a firm gel when the mixture reaches a high enough temperature for long enough. Boiling too gently leaves the jelly runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull in flavor.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, 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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