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Dessert

Fruit Jellies

A preserve made by boiling fruit, extracting juice, and sweetening it with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Fruit Jellies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Cut the fruits into pieces and remove any defective cores.

  2. Add water to just cover the fruit and boil gently until tender.

  3. Turn the mixture into a straining bag and let it drain for 3-4 hours or overnight.

Make the jelly

  1. Measure the juice and add an equal amount of sugar.

  2. Boil the juice for 20 minutes, skimming off any foam.

  3. Add the hot sugar to the juice and stir until dissolved.

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. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Fruits
Provide the natural pectin and acid that let the juice set into a jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps it set into a firm, glossy jelly.

The step that matters

Boil the juice for 20 minutes. Boiling concentrates the juice and drives off water so the pectin and sugar can reach the level needed to set. Skimming removes foam that would otherwise cloud the jelly.

“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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