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Economical Fruit Jellies Made From Jam

A method for making fruit jellies from fruit and sugar by boiling and separating juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and rhubarb share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 40 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Economical Fruit Jellies Made From Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fruit

  1. In a pan, combine the fruit and sugar and boil for about 20 minutes.

  2. Pour off some of the juice for jelly.

Make the jam and jelly

  1. Continue boiling the remaining fruit until it reaches the desired consistency for jam.

  2. Boil the strained juice separately until it jellies.

  3. Add extra sugar if needed.

Alternative method

  1. Heat the fruit without sugar until the juice flows.

  2. Strain the juice and add sugar to both the juice and fruit.

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. Plum + rhubarbtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together40 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,852 recipes

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

  3. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Juicy fruit
Supplies juice, natural pectin and acid that help the jam and jelly set.
Sugar
Helps the mixture set, adds sweetness and helps preserve the finished jam or jelly.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice until it jellies. Juice for jelly must boil until it sets. Setting depends on pectin, acid and sugar reaching the right balance, so a runny or overly stiff result is common if the boil is cut short or extended. Judge by the set, not the clock.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rhubarb, 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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