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Dessert

Strawberry Jelly

A fruit jelly made from strawberries, sugar, water, gelatin, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Pick the strawberries and place them in a pan.

  2. Squeeze the strawberries with a wooden spoon to extract juice.

  3. Add the pounded sugar to sweeten.

  4. Let sit for 1 hour.

  5. Add ½ cup water for every pint of juice extracted.

  6. Strain the mixture through a napkin, straining well to avoid muddiness.

Set the jelly

  1. Dissolve half a package of gelatine in 1 teacup of water.

  2. Mix the dissolved gelatine with the strained juice.

  3. Add lemon juice if desired.

  4. Pour the mixture into a mold.

  5. Set the mold on 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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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 juice and flavor that form the body of the jelly.
Pounded sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the fruit's tartness.
Gelatine
Sets the strained juice into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the strawberry flavor.

The step that matters

Strain the juice well. Straining removes pulp and fine solids that would otherwise make the set jelly cloudy or muddy. Clear juice gives a clean, glossy finished 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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