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Dessert

Gloucester Jelly

A grain and root jelly made by simmering rice, sago, barley, Eringo root, and hartshorn shavings, then cooling to a stiff consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and barley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 568 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Gloucester Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Combine rice, sago, pearl barley, Scotch barley, Eringo root, and hartshorn shavings in a pot.

  2. Add 3 pints of water and simmer until reduced to 1 pint.

  3. Strain the mixture and let it cool to form a stiff jelly.

  4. Optionally, boil a brown crust of bread and a little cinnamon with the jelly.

Serve

  1. To serve, dissolve a spoonful of jelly in warm liquid like tea, coffee, milk, or broth.

  2. Alternatively, mix with an equal quantity of wine and add sugar, spice, or lemon juice to taste.

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. Rice + barleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together568 recipes

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

  2. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Barley + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together127 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Hartshorn shavings
Contain gelatin-like compounds that set the liquid into a firm jelly as it cools.
Sago
Starch that thickens the liquid and helps it set into a stiff jelly.
Rice
Starch that thickens the liquid and adds body to the jelly.
Pearl barley
Starch that thickens the liquid and adds body to the jelly.

“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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