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Dessert

Cranberry Jelly

A sweet jelly made by boiling cranberry juice with sugar, optionally adding berry pulp, then poured into prepared glasses.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cranberry work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cranberry Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare cranberry juice according to general directions.

Make the jelly

  1. Add 1 pound of sugar to each pint of juice, boil, skim, and test for firmness.

  2. Rinse jelly glasses in cold water before pouring the jelly.

  3. For pulp, wash and boil sour berries with just enough water to prevent burning.

  4. Pass the pulp through a colander or fruit strainer to remove skins.

  5. Add an equal quantity of granulated sugar to the juice and boil until firm.

Mold and serve

  1. Mold the jelly in individual dishes or a large mold after dipping them in very cold water.

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 + cranberrytop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together374 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set firm by binding water.
Cranberry juice
Provides the tart flavor and the acid and pectin needed for gelling.

The step that matters

Boil until firm. Sugar and pectin only set into a gel once enough water has evaporated and the mixture reaches the right concentration. Stopping the boil early leaves a runny jelly, so the firmness test matters.

“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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