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Dessert

Coffee Jelly

A chilled coffee-flavored gelatin dessert sweetened to taste and topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Coffee Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Soak the gelatine in a little cold water.

  2. Pour the boiling coffee over the soaked gelatine.

  3. Sweeten to taste and stir until dissolved.

  4. Strain the mixture and pour it into a mold.

  5. Refrigerate until very cold.

Serve

  1. 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the coffee liquid into a firm, wobbly jelly when chilled.
Boiling coffee
Provides the liquid base and the coffee flavour of the jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the coffee so it balances its bitterness.
Whipped cream
Adds a rich, fat-based contrast to the cold, lightly firm coffee jelly.

The step that matters

Soak the gelatine before adding the hot coffee. Gelatine must hydrate in cold water first so its protein strands spread evenly; added straight to hot liquid it can clump and set unevenly.

“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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