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Dessert

Fruit Gelatine

A gelatin dessert made with lemon and orange juice, sweetened, and optionally layered with fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Gelatine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatine

  1. Soak the gelatine in 1/2 cup of cold water for a few minutes.

  2. Dissolve the soaked gelatine in 1/2 cup of hot water.

  3. Add the lemon and orange juice to the gelatine mixture.

  4. If the mixture is less than 1 pint, add more water to reach 1 pint.

  5. Sweeten to taste and strain through a fine strainer.

Set and serve

  1. In a cool place, let it begin to set.

  2. In a mold, layer jelly, then sliced bananas or candied cherries, and repeat until all is used.

  3. Refrigerate until firm enough to turn out.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Lemon + bananatop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  5. Sugar + bananatop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

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

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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm jelly as it cools.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the jelly.
Orange juice
Adds fruity sweetness and aroma to the jelly.

The step that matters

Soak the gelatine before dissolving it. Gelatine must first absorb cold water so its granules swell and dissolve evenly. Adding it directly to hot liquid can leave lumps and weaken the set.

Swap the banana

The recipe marks banana as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, orange, sugar):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, orange, 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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