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Dessert

Strawberry Jelly

A gelatinous dessert made from strawberries, sugar, water, isinglass, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and gelatin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,778 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Strawberry Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick the strawberries and crush them in a pan with a wooden spoon.

  2. Add enough pounded sugar to sweeten.

  3. Let sit for 1 hour to extract the juice.

  4. Add 1 pint of water for every pint of juice.

  5. Strain the strawberry juice and water through a bag.

  6. Measure the juice.

  7. Ensure the mixture is well strained.

Set the jelly

  1. Add 1 oz of melted and clarified isinglass for every pint.

  2. Mix the isinglass with the juice.

  3. Add a little lemon juice to enhance the flavor.

  4. Pour the mixture into a mold.

  5. Set the mold in ice.

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 + gelatintop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Gelatin + lemontop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,215 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-pinene (pine, resin).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Strawberries
Provide the main flavor and colour of the jelly.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances the fruit's tartness.
Isinglass (gelatin)
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.

The step that matters

Set the mold in ice. Isinglass is a gelatin that sets only when cold, so the mold must chill enough for the mixture to firm into a jelly rather than stay liquid.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, gelatin):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, gelatin. 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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