Skip to main content
Dessert

Red Pepper Jelly

A sweet preserve made from ripe red peppers and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,401 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Red Pepper Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the ripe red peppers and place them in a granite pan.

  2. Set the pan in a kettle of cold water over high heat.

Make the jelly

  1. Boil until the juice is fully extracted.

  2. For every pint of juice, add 1 pound of sugar and boil until thickened.

  3. Pour into small tumblers.

Serve

  1. Serve with cold meats.

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. Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

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

Pepper and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 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

Ripe red peppers
Provide the main flavor and juice that the jelly is made from.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it thicken into a jelly when boiled.

The step that matters

Boiling with sugar until thickened. Sugar and pectin-containing juice must reach a sufficient concentration to set. Boiling too briefly leaves the jelly runny, while overboiling can make it stiff or caramelize the sugar.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes