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Jelly

A savory jelly made from stock, sugar, spices, lemon, and eggs, strained through a jelly bag.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the top of the saucepan with a towel wrung out of hot water and dry it.

  2. Prepare a jelly bag by rinsing it with boiling water, then place it over a clean basin.

Make the jelly

  1. Combine stock, sugar, mace, cloves, cassia buds, cinnamon, lemon rind, lemon juice, beaten eggs, and crushed eggshells in a clean saucepan.

  2. Heat the mixture, whisking briskly until it boils, then reduce heat and simmer gently for 5–10 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat, cover, and let it settle for 5–10 minutes.

Strain

  1. Pour the jelly into the bag, allowing it to drain, then gently return the first runnings back into the bag for a second filtering.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cassia + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together116 recipes

    Shared aroma: cinnamyl acetate (sweet aromatic, cinnamon).

  3. Clove + cassiatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together194 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg whites and yolks coagulate as they heat, helping clarify the stock and set the jelly.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the liquid set into a jelly by binding water.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and supports setting.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the jelly.

The step that matters

Whisking until it boils. Whisking while heating keeps the egg proteins from clumping onto the bottom of the pan and lets them rise and trap impurities, which clarifies the liquid. Gentle simmering afterwards prevents the egg from breaking up and cloudying the jelly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, clove, cassia, cinnamon, lemon, egg):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, clove, cassia, cinnamon, lemon, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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