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Dessert

Bread Jelly

Bread jelly is a sweet, lemony jelly made by simmering toasted bread in water, then adding milk, sugar, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Bread Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Toast the slice of bread until dry and brown.

  2. Remove the crusts from the toasted bread.

  3. Break the bread into pieces.

Make the jelly

  1. Place the bread in a small saucepan and cover it with water.

  2. Simmer for at least 2 hours, adding more water if necessary, until it becomes jelly-like.

  3. Strain the water off.

Finish and serve

  1. Mix in the milk, grated lemon rind or nutmeg, and sugar to taste.

  2. Serve hot or cold.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Breaks down during long simmering to form the jelly-like body of the dish.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the mild, starchy flavour of the bread.
Milk or cream
Adds richness and softens the flavour of the jelly.
Lemon
Adds acidity and bright aroma to offset the sweetness.

The step that matters

Simmering until jelly-like. The bread must simmer long enough for its starch to gelatinise and break down into a thick, jelly-like texture. Stopping too early leaves a watery, pasty result, while adding water as it reduces keeps the mixture from scorching and sticking to the pan.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar, nutmeg, milk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, nutmeg, milk. 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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