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Dessert

Champagne Jelly

A clear, transparent jelly made with champagne, sugar, lemon juice, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Mary Ronald · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and champagne work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Champagne Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Soak 1/2 box of Cox's gelatin in 1/2 cupful of cold water.

  2. Add 1 cupful of boiling water.

  3. Add 1 cupful of sugar.

  4. Add 1 teaspoonful of filtered lemon juice.

  5. Add 1 cupful of champagne.

  6. Combine the gelatin mixture as in wine jelly, but do not add champagne until the jelly is cold.

By Mary Ronald. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

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 + champagnetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + champagnetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together424 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and lemon 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm jelly as it cools.
Champagne
Adds flavour and aroma to the jelly.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the wine's acidity.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour.

The step that matters

Add the champagne only after the jelly is cold. Champagne is a sparkling wine, and its carbonation and delicate aroma are lost when it is added to hot liquid. Adding it once the jelly is cold keeps the bubbles and flavour and avoids disturbing the gelatine as it begins to set.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, champagne. 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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