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Dessert

Wine Jelly

A gelatin dessert made with sherry wine, lemon juice, sugar, cinnamon, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Wine Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in cold water.

  2. Boil the quart of water with the cinnamon sticks.

Make the jelly

  1. Pour the boiling water over the dissolved gelatine.

  2. Stir in the sugar, lemon juice, and sherry wine.

  3. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

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 + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Wine + cinnamontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  5. Sherry + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, wobbly jelly as it cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sherry and lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances sweetness.
Sherry wine
Gives the jelly its main flavour and some alcohol aroma.

The step that matters

Pour the boiling water over the dissolved gelatine. Gelatine must be fully dissolved to set evenly. Stirring it in well while the liquid is hot helps prevent lumps and cloudy patches in the finished jelly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, sherry, wine, cinnamon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, sherry, wine, cinnamon. 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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