Skip to main content
Dessert

Bread Jelly

Bread jelly is a sweet or savory jelly made by simmering toasted bread in water and flavoring with sugar, orange juice, broth, or salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Bread Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Remove the crust from the penny roll and cut the crumb into slices.

  2. Toast the slices on both sides until pale brown.

Make the jelly

  1. Simmer the toasted bread in 1 quart of water until it becomes jelly.

  2. Strain the mixture through a thin cloth.

Flavor and serve

  1. Flavor the jelly with sugar and orange juice, or with broth and salt if desired.

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. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Penny roll
Its starch thickens the water into a jelly as it simmers and breaks down.
Water
Extracts flavor and starch from the toasted bread and forms the body of the jelly.

The step that matters

Simmering the toasted bread until it becomes jelly. Simmering must be long enough for the starch in the bread to swell and break down into a thick liquid. Stopping early leaves a thin, weak jelly, while overcooking can make it pasty and cloudy.

“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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes