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Dessert

Arrowroot Jelly

A gelatinous dessert made from arrowroot, milk, and sugar, topped with red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and red currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Stir 3 ounces of arrowroot into 1 quart of boiling milk.

  2. Sweeten with sifted sugar to taste.

  3. Pour the mixture into a mold and let it cool.

Serve

  1. Once cold, turn it out and decorate the top with red currant jelly.

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. Arrowroot + red curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Milk + red curranttop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together193 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set jelly as it cooks and cools.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the arrowroot thickens into a creamy jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly to taste.

The step that matters

Stirring the arrowroot into boiling milk. Arrowroot must be stirred in smoothly so it disperses before thickening; adding it to milk that is not boiling, or letting it sit, can leave lumps and a weaker set.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against arrowroot, milk, 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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