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Dessert

Bran Jelly

A thick, gelatinous dessert made from wheat bran, water, and flour, served with cream or fruit juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,373 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bran Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the bran base

  1. Slowly sprinkle clean wheat bran into boiling water while stirring briskly with a wooden spoon until the mixture reaches the consistency of thick gruel.

  2. Cook slowly in a double boiler for two hours.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine wire sieve into a basin.

Set and serve

  1. Reheat the strained mixture to boiling.

  2. Stir in a spoonful of sifted Graham flour rubbed smooth in a little cold water, then boil once more and turn into molds previously wet in cold water.

  3. Once cool, serve with cream or fruit juice.

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. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  3. Wheat + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together681 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Clean wheat bran
Provides the bulk and fibrous body that gives the jelly its structure.
Graham flour
Starch from the flour thickens the strained liquid so it holds its shape in the mold.

The step that matters

Stirring in the bran. Sprinkling the bran slowly into boiling water while stirring briskly prevents lumps forming and clumping, which would leave an uneven, gritty texture in the finished 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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