[Sca-cooks] Synonym Assistance

[Antonia Calvo]

Lilinah wrote:
> I wrote:
>>  Yerasimos uses the French gelee (literally jelly) in a number of
>>  places.
> (SNIP)
>>  The one i'm having trouble with is the application of gelee to Paluze.
>>  This is a dish made of fruit juice, sugar, and wheat starch, cooked
>>  until thick, then poured onto a marble slab to set, then cut into
>>  pieces. Descriptions in other sources say it is chewy, and make it
>>  sound as if it's almost like fruit leather, but not so tough.
>>
>>  I know that the English often say "jelly", where we USAmericans would
>>  say jello, but that's a brand name; it's clearly not gelatin, since no
>>  gelatin is involved; and i don't want to say fruit leather, because it
>>  isn't quite.
>>
>>  For the moment i have "fruit gel", which isn't quite right either.
>
> And Antonia responded:
>> Sooo... what's wrong with just calling it a jelly?
>
> Jelly means different things to English speakers in different places. 
> I am guessing that since you're in New Zealand, you lean toward the 
> British form...
>
> In the US where i am, jelly is a relative of jam. Juice and sugar are 
> cooked to a soft spreadable state with enough pectin to set up a bit, 
> like jam but without the pulp. Can't be cut into pieces.
>
> As far as i understand, in Britain jelly is what we in the US call 
> jello, a semi-solid jiggly translucent sweet dish made with a base of 
> gelatin (i suppose one could also use agar, for something that won't 
> melt in heat) sugar, and, theoretically, fruit juice. I would not 
> describe jello as chewy, since it dissolves in one's mouth.

Actually, in the Anglosphere, jelly is _both_ of those things.  You have 
to divine which one from context.


> Neither form of jelly is like the item in question, which is cooked 
> down longer than US jelly, and is somewhat chewy and seems to be, mmm, 
> flatter, than jello/jelly, although not as flat, dry, and tough as 
> fruit leather.

Which sounds like a kind of sweet called a "fruit jelly"-- which is 
fairly solid, but not quite as chewy as Turkish delight.



-- 
Antonia di Benedetto Calvo 

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