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Apple Jelly to Use for Other Fruit

Apple jelly made by cooking apples with water and sugar, then straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Apple Jelly to Use for Other Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the apples

  1. Pour the cold water into a stewpan.

  2. Peel, core, and weigh the apples quickly, then add them to the water.

  3. Stew the apples until they are well broken.

Strain and sweeten

  1. Strain the mixture through a jelly bag.

  2. For every quart of juice, add 1 ⅓ lbs of sugar.

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. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Boiling apples
Provide pectin and acid, which help the juice gel into a jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and, with pectin and acid, helps it set firmly.

The step that matters

For every quart of juice, add 1 ⅓ lbs of sugar.. Sugar works with the apples' pectin and acid to form a gel. Too little sugar can leave the jelly soft or runny, while the correct ratio helps it set and keep well.

“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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