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Dessert

Bread Jelly

Bread Jelly is a sweetened, lemon-flavored jelly made by boiling stale bread in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Bread Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Toast the stale bread slices.

  2. Pour boiling water over the toasted bread and add lemon juice.

  3. Boil the mixture until it thickens to a jelly.

  4. Strain the jelly.

Finish and flavor

  1. Sweeten the jelly to taste.

  2. Add a little nutmeg or lemon peel for flavor.

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  4. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Stale bread
Provides starch and body that thicken into a jelly when simmered with water.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to taste and rounds out the flavor of the jelly.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until it thickens to a jelly. Starch from the toasted bread must be cooked in boiling water so its granules swell and gelatinize. Stopping too early leaves the mixture thin, and it sets only as it cools.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, nutmeg. 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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