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Dessert

Wine Jelly

A gelatin dessert made with Madeira wine, lemon, sugar, and 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 sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Wine Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gelatine

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in 1 pint of cold water.

  2. Let it stand for 10 minutes.

  3. Add 1 pint of boiling water, stirring until fully dissolved.

Make the jelly

  1. Mix in the Madeira wine, lemon juice and peel, and sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture while stirring continually with the beaten egg whites.

  3. Allow it to boil once.

  4. Remove from heat and let it stand for 1 minute.

Strain

  1. Pour boiling water into a flannel bag.

  2. Wring the bag out.

  3. Keep the bag warm.

  4. Pour the mixture into the bag and let it drip through without squeezing.

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 + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Madeira wine + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together343 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Madeira wine + lemontop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Lemon and sugar 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, wobbly jelly as it cools.
Madeira wine
Adds the main flavour and alcohol while the liquid stays fairly thin.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and balances the wine and lemon acidity.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the wine flavour.
Egg whites
Foam up and collect impurities as the mixture boils, which are then trapped for a clearer jelly.

The step that matters

Boiling with the egg whites. Stirring the beaten whites into the boiling liquid makes them coagulate and trap cloudy particles. Boiling only once and then letting it rest keeps the foam from breaking back into the liquid, so the strained jelly stays clear.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Currantfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against madeira wine, sugar, 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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