Skip to main content
Dessert

Gloucester Jelly

A stiff jelly made from rice, sago, barley, Eringo root, hartshorn shavings, and optional isinglass, sweetened and flavored with sugar, spice, lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and barley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 568 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Gloucester Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Simmer rice, sago, barley, Eringo root, and hartshorn shavings in 3 pints of water until reduced to 1 pint.

  2. Strain the mixture and let it cool; it will form a stiff jelly.

  3. For isinglass jelly, boil 1 ounce of isinglass in 1 quart of water until reduced to 1 pint or less.

  4. You may also boil a brown crust of bread and a little cinnamon with the jelly.

Serve

  1. To serve, dissolve a spoonful of jelly in warm liquid like tea, coffee, milk, or broth.

  2. Alternatively, mix with an equal quantity of wine and add sugar, spice, or lemon 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. Rice + barleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together568 recipes

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

  2. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Barley + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together127 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Hartshorn shavings
Set the liquid into a stiff jelly as it cools.
Sago
Thickens the liquid and adds body to the jelly.
Rice
Adds starch that thickens the liquid as it simmers.
Pearl barley
Adds starch and body to the simmered liquid.
Isinglass
Gelatinous agent that helps the optional isinglass jelly set.

“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 Rice PuddingLemon Rice Pudding19 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes