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Dessert

Cider Jelly

A gelatin dessert made with cider, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Champagne and cider share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13 recipes. Both carry ethyl pentanoate, which smells yeast, fruit. The science ↓

Cider Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Soak the gelatine in ½ cup of cold water for 2 hours.

  2. Add ½ cup of boiling water and the sugar to the soaked gelatine and stir until dissolved.

  3. Let the mixture cool slightly, then add the lemon juice and champagne cider.

  4. Strain the mixture and either mold it or, once it has set, break it into pieces and serve on a dish with a fine fringed napkin.

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. Champagne + cidertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

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

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

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

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

  4. Lemon + cidertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together986 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. 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, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the jelly a clear, soft body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavour.
Champagne cider
Provides the main flavour and liquid base of the jelly.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool slightly before adding the lemon juice and cider. Gelatine begins to set as it cools, so a mixture that is too hot may lose flavour from delicate ingredients, while a mixture that is too cool may set unevenly. Adding the liquids once it has cooled a little helps the gelatine set smoothly and evenly throughout.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, champagne, cider. 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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