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Dessert

Arrowroot Jelly

A clear jelly made from arrowroot, water, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub the arrowroot smooth in a little cold water.

Cook the jelly

  1. Stir it into the boiling water with dissolved sugar.

  2. Stir until clear, allowing it to boil continuously.

  3. Lastly, add the lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve cold, with cream and sugar if allowed.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the water into a clear, glossy jelly as its starch swells and sets when cooled.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the mild, starchy flavour of the jelly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the jelly.

The step that matters

Stir until clear, allowing it to boil continuously. Arrowroot starch must be fully heated and boiled to swell and thicken properly. Stopping early leaves the jelly cloudy and weakly set, so it should be stirred and kept boiling until it turns clear.

“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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