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Dessert

Fruit Jelly

A chilled gelatin dessert made with bananas, grapes, figs, oranges, walnuts, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatine base

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in cold water.

  2. Add boiling water and lemon juice to the dissolved gelatine.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the bananas, figs, and oranges into small pieces.

  2. Remove seeds from the grapes and chop the walnuts.

  3. Stir all the fruit and walnuts into the gelatine mixture.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold and refrigerate until hard.

  2. Serve with whipped cream.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Banana + figtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together104 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Grape + figtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together323 recipes

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

  4. Fig + walnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together373 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Banana + grapetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Malaga grapes
Add juicy bulk and sweetness, and hold their shape within the jelly.
Bananas
Add soft texture and body to the jelly.
Oranges
Add citrus flavour and juiciness to the jelly.
English walnuts
Add crunch that contrasts with the soft jelly.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatine in cold water first. Gelatine must hydrate fully in cold liquid before boiling water is added. If it is added to hot water without hydrating, it can clump and fail to set evenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (banana, grape, fig, walnut, orange):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, grape, fig, walnut, orange. 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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