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Dessert

Wine or Champagne Jelly

A gelatin dessert made with wine or champagne, sugar, lemon, spices, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Wine or Champagne Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Pour 1 pint of cold water over the gelatine and let it soak for 10 minutes.

  2. Add 1 pint of boiling water and stir until the gelatine is dissolved.

  3. Mix in the wine, sugar, lemon rind, lemon juice, nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon.

  4. Stir in the beaten egg whites and heat on low, stirring until it starts to boil.

  5. Remove from heat and strain through a jelly bag rinsed in boiling water.

Set and serve

  1. Wet a mold with cold water, pour in the jelly, and set on ice to cool.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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.
Egg whites
Bind to impurities as they heat, so the strained jelly comes out clear.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the set jelly its body.
Wine
Provides the main flavour and acidity of the jelly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the wine flavour.

The step that matters

Straining the jelly. Egg whites collect cloudy particles as the mixture heats, and straining through a jelly bag removes them. Rushing this step or using a loose cloth leaves the jelly cloudy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, sugar, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, egg. 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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