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Dessert

Arrowroot Jelly

A sweet jelly made with arrowroot, sugar, and blackberry cordial.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and blackberry share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, bring 1 cup of water to a boil.

  2. Stir in 2 heaping teaspoons of arrowroot until dissolved.

  3. Add 2 teaspoons of white sugar and 3 tablespoons of blackberry cordial.

  4. Mix well and let cool before serving.

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 + blackberrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Sugar + blackberrytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Starch that thickens the liquid and sets as it cools into a clear, glossy jelly.
White sugar
Adds sweetness to the jelly.
Blackberry cordial
Supplies blackberry flavour and aroma, along with some sweetness.

The step that matters

Stirring in the arrowroot. Arrowroot must be fully dispersed in the liquid before it thickens, or it forms lumps. Its starch thickens as the mixture heats and sets to a firm gel only as it cools, so the jelly should not be judged set until it has cooled.

Swap the blackberry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Blackberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against arrowroot, 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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