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Dessert

Oseille or Roselle Jam and Jelly

A jam or jelly made from oseille or roselle fruit, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Roselle and sugar work together. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Oseille or Roselle Jam and Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut off the lower part of the stem and a portion of the top from the fruit.

  2. Remove the seeds, wash, and clean the fruit.

Cook the fruit

  1. Place the fruit in an earthen jar and put it in a large saucepan of water.

  2. Add ½ cup of water for each pound of fruit and boil briskly for several hours until it forms a jelly.

  3. Remove from heat and add the same weight of sugar for each pound of fruit.

  4. Put the mixture into a jelly pan and boil as you would for any jam.

Variation for jelly

  1. For jelly, clean the fruit and boil as directed, then strain the juice through a bag or cloth.

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. Roselle + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Oseille or roselle fruit
Provides the main body and tart flavour of the jam, and the pectin that lets it set into a jelly.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with the cooking, helps the mixture thicken and set.

The step that matters

Boiling until it forms a jelly. Fruit needs prolonged vigorous boiling so that water evaporates and pectin and acid can set the mixture. Stopping too early leaves a runny result, while overcooking can make it stiff and dark.

“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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