Skip to main content
Dessert

Chinese Jelly & Honey

A Chinese dessert made by combining boiled sugar water with jelly, honey, ginger, rose extract, and lemon oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Chinese Jelly & Honey

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil 1 pint of water with ¼ ounce of alum on high heat, then remove from heat.

  2. Stir in 4 pounds of white sugar and boil for 2 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and let the boiling subside, then return to heat for 30 seconds, twice.

  4. Strain the mixture through a cotton cloth.

Make the jelly

  1. When cool, add 1 teaspoon of this mixture to 4 pounds of jelly.

  2. For lemon jelly, add 1 drop of oil of lemon to the bottom of the jar, pour in the warm jelly, and let it stand for 10 hours.

  3. To make honey jelly, mix ¼ pound of pure honey with 4 pounds of jelly and let it stand for 3 hours.

Prepare the extract

  1. To prepare the extract, combine 1 ounce of pulverized Jamaica ginger and 20 drops of Otto of roses in 1 pint of pure alcohol, shaking twice a day for 2 days.

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 + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Honey + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Honey + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together94 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Lemon + honeytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,707 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Forms the sweet base and, when boiled, helps build the firm jelly texture.
Alum
Helps set the jelly and keeps its texture firm.
Pure honey
Adds sweetness and a softer, moist character to the honey jelly.
Pure alcohol
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavor from the ginger and roses.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar syrup. Boiling must be controlled so the sugar concentrates without scorching. Letting the boil subside before reheating keeps the syrup from burning and sugar from crystallizing unevenly, which affects the final set.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, honey, ginger, rose):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, honey, ginger, rose. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes