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Dessert

Wine Jelly

A gelatin dessert made with wine, lemon juice, sugar, and clarified egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and wine 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 ↓

Wine Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Dissolve

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water for 30 minutes.

  2. Add boiling water and sugar, stirring until dissolved.

  3. Mix in lemon juice and sherry wine.

Clarify and set

  1. Stir in the beaten egg whites with the shells to clarify the mixture.

  2. Bring to a boil, then strain and pour into a mold.

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. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 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 + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm jelly as it cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the lemon and sherry.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the jelly.
Sherry wine
Gives the jelly its main flavour and aroma.
Egg whites
Trap fine particles as they heat, helping clear the liquid.

The step that matters

Clarifying with egg whites. As the whites heat, they bind sediment and cloudy particles to themselves. If the whites are not fully mixed in, or the mixture is stirred hard during the boil, the particles stay dispersed and the jelly stays cloudy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, sherry, wine, 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.

More wine jelly recipes

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

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