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Dessert

Orange Jelly

A gelatinous dessert made from orange juice, lemon juice, sugar, and clarified stock, set with isinglass and flavored with brandy and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Boil the neat's foot in 2 quarts of water all day.

  2. Strain the stock.

  3. Let the stock cool.

  4. Remove the grease from the stock.

  5. Reduce the stock to less than half a pint.

Make the jelly

  1. Rub the peels of 12 oranges on lump sugar to extract the color.

  2. Combine the foot stock, isinglass, and a little water in a stewpan.

  3. Boil the mixture.

  4. Add the sugar and the juice of the 2 oranges, 1 Seville orange, and 2 lemons.

  5. Strain the mixture into the isinglass mixture.

  6. Strain through a tammy into a bowl.

  7. Stir occasionally.

  8. Add the French brandy and white wine.

  9. When nearly set, pour into a mold.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Brandy + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together620 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Orange + white winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together730 recipes

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

  5. Orange + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,706 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Neat's foot
Boiled down to make a rich, gelatinous stock that gives the jelly body.
Isinglass
Gelatin-like fish protein that sets the liquid into a firm jelly when cooled.
Oranges
Supply the main citrus flavour and, through their peel, the colour of the jelly.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the flavour.
Lump sugar
Adds sweetness and helps extract colour from the orange peel.

The step that matters

Strain the stock and remove the grease before reducing. Fat left in the stock can make the jelly cloudy and greasy and interfere with a clean set. Chilling and skimming the stock removes most of it before the stock is concentrated.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits about as well
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar, brandy, white 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.

More orange jelly recipes

Seville 17Cake 13Florida 8Baskets 8Lemon 4China 3 See all 328 →

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