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Dessert

Apple Jelly

Apple jelly is a fruit preserve made by cooking apples with water and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Pare and cut the apples into pieces, removing the cores.

  2. Place the apples in a preserving pan and cover with cold water.

  3. Boil for 1 hour.

Extract the juice

  1. Drain the syrup through a jelly bag.

  2. Measure the juice.

Make the jelly

  1. Add 3 lbs of loaf sugar for every pint of juice.

  2. Boil the juice and sugar together for 30 minutes.

  3. Skim off any scum.

  4. Stir well to prevent burning.

  5. Optionally, add lemon rind while boiling.

  6. Optionally, add strained lemon juice before finishing.

Pot

  1. Store in small pots.

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. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Apples
Supply pectin and acid, which help the juice set into a jelly.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, with pectin and acid, helps it gel and keep.

The step that matters

Stir well to prevent burning. Sugar-rich juice scorches easily on the bottom of the pan during a long boil. Burnt sugar gives a bitter taste and dark colour, so the mixture should be stirred steadily while it boils.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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