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Dessert

Raspberry Jelly

A clear raspberry jelly made by boiling fruit, straining, and cooking with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Raspberry and currant work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 366 recipes. Both carry ethyl benzoate, which smells fruity, sweet. The science ↓

Raspberry Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the juice

  1. Boil the fruit until it becomes a pulp, about 2 hours.

  2. Strain the juice through flannel, passing it through more than once for clarity.

Make the jelly

  1. Combine the juice and sugar in a saucepan and boil for 45 minutes.

  2. Test for jelliness by placing a small amount on a cold plate.

  3. Pour into jars and cover once cooled.

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. Raspberry + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together366 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  2. Raspberry + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,101 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Raspberry juice
Provides the main flavour and the liquid that sets into the jelly.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set firm when boiled with the juice.
Red-currant juice
Adds extra pectin and tartness to help the jelly set and brighten its flavour.

The step that matters

Testing for set. Overboiling makes the jelly too stiff, while underboiling leaves it runny. A small sample chilled on a cold plate shows whether it wrinkles when pushed, which indicates it has reached the right concentration of sugar and pectin to set.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raspberry, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Red currantfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raspberry, sugar. 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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