Skip to main content
Dessert

Pie-plant Jelly

A jelly made from pie-plant juice, lemons, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pie-plant Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pick the pie-plant while it is tender and juicy.

  2. Boil the pie-plant carefully to avoid scorching.

  3. Add sliced lemons to the boiling mixture as desired.

  4. Strain the mixture through a flannel bag without squeezing.

  5. For every 3 pints of juice, add 2 pints of sugar.

  6. Boil until the mixture jellies nicely.

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 + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 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

Pie-plant
Supplies the juice and tart flavour that the jelly is made from.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set into a gel as it boils.
Lemons
Add acidity and aroma, brightening the flavour and supporting the set.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture jellies nicely. Sugar and fruit acid must be concentrated by boiling for the pectin in the juice to form a gel. Stopping too early leaves a runny jelly, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

“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 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes