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To Make Hartshorn Jelly a Second Way

Hartshorn jelly made by boiling hartshorn with water, then mixing with wine, egg whites, mace, lemon juice, and sugar, and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Wine and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

To Make Hartshorn Jelly a Second Way

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the jelly

  1. Combine hartshorn and water in a pot.

  2. Let it stand in the oven overnight.

  3. Strain the mixture to remove the hartshorn.

Make and set the jelly

  1. In a separate pot, mix the strained liquid with Rhenish wine, egg whites, mace, lemon juice, and sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture together and strain it through a jelly bag.

  3. Once fine, pour it into glasses for use.

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. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Mace + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,315 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Hartshorn
Its gelatin forms the jelly that sets the dish when cooled.
Egg whites
Help clarify the liquid, gathering impurities that are then strained out.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sugar.
Rhenish wine
Adds flavor and acidity to the liquid before it is set.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture together and strain it through a jelly bag. Egg whites must be boiled with the liquid so they can coagulate and trap cloudy particles. Straining through a jelly bag then removes them, leaving a clear jelly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, egg, lemon, sugar. 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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