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Dessert

Cranberry Jelly

A gelatinous preserve made from cranberry juice, sugar, lemon juice, egg whites, and isinglass.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cranberry and lemon work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 210 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cranberry Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dissolve the isinglass in the water over low heat.

  2. Press the cranberries to extract the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. Combine the isinglass mixture with the cranberry juice, lemon juice, sugar, egg whites, and crushed shells.

  2. Simmer for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain through muslin until clear.

Set

  1. Pour into a mold and let set.

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. Cranberry + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together210 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Cranberry + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together374 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

Isinglass
Fish-based gelatin that sets the liquid into a firm, wobbly jelly.
Cranberry juice
Provides the main liquid, tart flavour and colour of the jelly.
Egg whites
Coagulate during simmering and trap fine particles so the jelly can be strained clear.
Crushed egg shells
Add extra surface for the egg whites to bind to, helping clarify the liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the cranberry and lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and sharpens the cranberry taste.

The step that matters

Simmer gently after adding the egg whites. As the egg whites heat they rise, coagulate and collect impurities. Boiling hard or stirring vigorously breaks up this clarifying layer and clouds the jelly, so the straining later will not give a clear result.

Swap the cranberry

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Cranberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, egg. 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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