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Dessert

Lemon Jelly Salad

A fruit salad with lemon‑jelly made from nuts, water, lemon juice, sugar, pineapple, oranges, and banana.

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 ↓

Lemon Jelly Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Combine nuts, boiling water, cold water, lemon juice, and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Stir until sugar dissolves and let it cool slightly.

Set and serve

  1. Add pineapple, oranges, and banana when the jelly is starting to set.

  2. Pour the mixture into small ramekins and refrigerate until firm.

  3. Serve on a lettuce leaf with salad dressing.

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. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  5. Lemon + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the jelly and fruit.
Boiling water
Dissolves the sugar and helps the gelling mixture set once cooled.

The step that matters

Add the fruit when the jelly is starting to set. If the jelly is still too liquid, the fruit sinks and settles unevenly. If it is fully set, the fruit will not distribute well and the layers may not hold together. Timing the addition at the partly set stage keeps the fruit suspended.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, pineapple, orange, banana. 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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