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Dessert

Strawberry Jelly

A homemade strawberry jelly made with fresh strawberries, sugar, 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

Prepare the juice

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

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

  3. Add enough pounded sugar to sweeten the strawberries and let them sit for 1 hour.

  4. Add ½ pint of water to the extracted juice.

  5. Strain the mixture through a napkin to remove solids.

Set the jelly

  1. Dissolve ½ package of gelatin in 1 teacupful of water.

  2. Mix the dissolved gelatin with the strained juice.

  3. If desired, add 1 teaspoon of lemon juice to enhance the flavor.

  4. Pour the mixture into a mold and set it 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 main flavour, colour and juice for the jelly.
Gelatine
Sets the strained juice into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the strawberry juice and balances its natural tartness.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatine fully before mixing. Undissolved gelatine forms lumps and weak spots in the set jelly. It needs to be completely dissolved in warm water and evenly combined with the juice so it sets uniformly.

“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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