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Dessert

Mixed Fruit Jelly

A fruit jelly made with agar agar, water, sugar, and chopped tropical fruits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and banana match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 733 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Mixed Fruit Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Dissolve the Agar Agar jelly in 1 pint of water in an enamel bowl.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of sugar and crushed egg shells to help clear the jelly.

  3. Optionally, color the jelly with a few drops of cochineal and flavor with maraschino or lime juice.

Layer and set in a mold

  1. Wet a mold and strain a little jelly into it.

  2. Add a layer of chopped pineapple, oranges, bananas, and mangosteen.

  3. Once cool, add more jelly and fruit, repeating until the mold is full.

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. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Orange + limetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together937 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Pineapple + limetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Agar + limetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Agar agar jelly
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavor of the jelly.
Chopped pineapple
Adds fruit flavor and texture between the jelly layers.
Chopped mangosteen
Adds fruit flavor and texture between the jelly layers.

The step that matters

Let each layer cool before adding more jelly and fruit. Agar sets at a fairly high temperature, so hot jelly poured over fruit can melt the layer below and blur the layers. Letting each layer cool until just set keeps the fruit suspended in distinct bands.

Swap the lime

The recipe marks lime as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (agar, sugar, egg, pineapple, orange, banana):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Strawberryfits about as well
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against agar, sugar, egg, pineapple, orange, banana. 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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