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Bread

Bread Jelly

Bread jelly is made by simmering toasted bread slices in water until the liquid thickens, then flavored with sugar, orange juice, broth, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Bread Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Remove the crust from the penny roll and cut the crumb into slices.

  2. Toast the slices on both sides until pale brown.

Make the jelly

  1. Place the toasted slices in a quart of water and simmer gently until the liquid becomes a jelly.

  2. Strain the mixture through a thin cloth.

  3. Flavor the jelly with sugar and orange juice, or with a little broth and salt.

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 + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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
Its starch thickens the water into a soft, jelly-like set as it simmers.
Water
Carries the bread's starch and dissolves its flavor as it simmers into a liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the plain bread flavor.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and fruity aroma to the jelly.

The step that matters

Simmering until the liquid becomes a jelly. Simmering gently lets the bread starch gelatinize and release into the water. Boiling hard or simmering too long can make the liquid cloudy or pasty instead of a clear, softly set jelly.

“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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