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Dessert

Modern Cookery

A citrus jelly made from orange and lemon juice, isinglass, egg white, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Juice the oranges and lemons to yield about 1 to 1.5 pints of juice.

  2. Clarify the isinglass and add an additional ½ ounce.

  3. Beat the egg white slightly and mix it with the pint of cold water.

  4. Whisk the egg white and water together for 1-2 minutes.

Make the jelly

  1. Pour the mixture over the isinglass and stir occasionally while heating.

  2. Boil gently for 2-3 minutes, skim off the scum, and strain the mixture.

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. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Orange + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Oranges
Their juice gives the jelly its main flavour and fresh acidity.
Lemons
Their juice adds sharpness that balances the sweetness and brightens the orange flavour.
Isinglass
A gelatine-like setting agent that firms the cooled juice into a jelly.
Egg white
Its proteins coagulate with heat and trap cloudy particles, helping the liquid clear.

The step that matters

Boil gently and skim the scum. Boiling hard or stirring too vigorously breaks up the egg white's coagulated particles and clouds the jelly. A gentle simmer lets them rise, so skimming and straining remove them and leave a clear result.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, egg):

  1. Orangethe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, egg. 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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