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Dessert

Strawberry Jelly

A fruit jelly made from strawberries, sugar, isinglass, water, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Pick the strawberries and place them in a pan.

  2. Squeeze the strawberries with a wooden spoon and add enough pounded sugar to sweeten them.

  3. Let the mixture sit for 1 hour to extract the juice.

  4. Add ½ cup of water for every pint of juice.

  5. Strain the strawberry juice and water through a bag.

Set the jelly

  1. Measure the juice and add 1 oz. of melted and clarified isinglass for every pint.

  2. Mix the isinglass with the juice.

  3. If the strawberries are very ripe, add 1 teaspoon of lemon juice to improve the flavor, but strain it well before mixing.

  4. Pour the jelly into a mold and set it in ice.

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Strawberries
Provide the main flavor and the juice that forms the jelly.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the strawberries and adds body to the juice.
Isinglass
Gelatin-like protein that sets the juice into a firm jelly.

The step that matters

Adding the isinglass to the juice. Isinglass must be melted and clarified first, then mixed evenly into the measured juice. If it is lumpy or unevenly mixed, or the juice is too warm, the jelly may set unevenly or fail to set firmly.

“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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