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Dessert

Coffee Jelly

A gelatin dessert made with coffee, sugar, and optional fruit, served chilled with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Coffee Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the jelly

  1. Soak the gelatine in water until soft.

  2. Pour hot coffee over the sugar and stir until dissolved.

  3. Add the softened gelatine and mix well.

  4. Strain the mixture into a mold, adding any desired fruit.

Set and serve

  1. Refrigerate until set and serve with whipped cream.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the liquid coffee into a firm, wobbly jelly as it cools.
Coffee
Provides the main flavour and liquid base of the jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the coffee and helps it dissolve evenly into the liquid.

The step that matters

Soak the gelatine until soft. Gelatine must hydrate fully in cold water before it is added to the hot coffee, otherwise it clumps and sets unevenly, leaving a grainy or lumpy jelly.

“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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