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Dessert

Wine Jelly

A gelatin dessert made with wine, orange juice, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Wine Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Dissolve the gelatin

  1. Soak the gelatin in cold water for 20 minutes.

  2. Dissolve the soaked gelatin in boiling water.

Flavor and set

  1. Add the sugar, sherry or madeira, orange juice, and lemon juice.

  2. Strain the mixture, mold it, and chill until set.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Gelatin + sugartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sherry + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together823 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Sherry + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

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

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

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

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

Gelatin
Forms the network that sets the liquid into a firm, wobbly jelly.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the citrus and wine.
Sherry or madeira
Adds the wine flavor that defines the jelly.
Orange juice
Adds fruity flavor and some acidity.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and cuts the sweetness.

The step that matters

Dissolve the soaked gelatin fully in boiling water. Gelatin only sets properly when it is completely dissolved. Undissolved granules leave soft spots or lumps and weaken the set, so the mixture should be stirred until clear before the other ingredients go in.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against gelatin, sugar, sherry, orange. 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.

More wine jelly recipes

Port 43Arrowroot 13Constantia 6Madeira 6Apricot 3Lemon 3 See all 239 →

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