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Dessert

Prune Jelly

A gelatin dessert made from prunes, sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Prune Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Soak the prunes in 1 quart of water.

  2. Remove the stones from the prunes.

Make the jelly

  1. Stew the prunes gently in the same water until tender.

  2. Dissolve the gelatine in 1 pint of cold water.

  3. Add the dissolved gelatine to the cooked prunes.

  4. Sweeten with sugar and add lemon juice and cinnamon 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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

Prunes
Provide the main flavour, body and natural sweetness of the jelly.
Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, wobbly jelly as it cools.

The step that matters

Add the dissolved gelatine to the cooked prunes. Gelatine must be fully dissolved before it is added, otherwise it can form specks or weak patches. Stirring it into the warm prune mixture evenly distributes it so the jelly sets uniformly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon. 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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