Skip to main content
Main

Bread Jelly

Bread jelly is a sweetened liquid made by simmering toasted bread slices in spring water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Bread Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Pare off the crust of the roll.

  2. Cut the crumb into thin slices.

  3. Toast the slices on both sides until light pale brown.

Make the jelly

  1. Put the toasted slices into a quart of spring water.

  2. Simmer gently over the fire until the liquid becomes a jelly.

  3. Strain the mixture through a thin cloth.

Flavour and finish

  1. Flavour the jelly with lemon juice and sugar while hot.

  2. If permitted, add wine for improvement.

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. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + winetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Penny roll
Toasted and simmered crumb releases starch and flavour that thicken the water into a jelly.
Spring water
Serves as the liquid that the bread softens in and gels around.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the bland bread flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the jelly.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until the liquid becomes a jelly. Gentle heat lets the bread's starch swell and gradually thicken the liquid. Boiling hard can break up the mixture and leave it cloudy, so the jelly may not set properly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, wine. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes