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Dessert

Four-fruit Jelly

A fruit jelly made from equal parts strawberries, raspberries, currants, and red cherries, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Four-fruit Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Combine equal amounts of strawberries, raspberries, currants, and stoned red cherries in a bowl.

  2. Place the fruit in a linen bag and squeeze thoroughly to extract juice.

  3. Measure the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. For every 1 pint of juice, add 1 pound and 2 ounces of sugar.

  2. Mix the juice and sugar in a preserving kettle and boil for 30 minutes, skimming frequently.

  3. To test, hold a spoonful of jelly in the open air; if it congeals quickly, it's done.

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. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Strawberries, raspberries, currants, and red cherries
Provide the fruit juice that forms the base of the jelly and its flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it set.

The step that matters

Testing for doneness. Jelly sets as its sugar concentration rises and pectin gels on cooling. Boiling too briefly leaves it runny, while overcooking can make it stiff, so the spoon test on cooling matters.

“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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