Skip to main content
Dessert

Hartshorn Jelly

A gelatinous dessert made by boiling hartshorn shavings or ivory turnings with water, sugar, lemon juice, and optional champagne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and champagne work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Hartshorn Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil hartshorn shavings or ivory turnings in 3 pints of water until reduced to 1 pint.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Add white sugar-candy and lemon juice to the strained liquid.

  4. Heat the mixture again to the boiling point.

  5. For variety, add up to 2 tablespoons of white capri, moselle, or champagne.

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 + champagnetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together404 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + champagnetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together424 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Hartshorn shavings
Dissolves into the liquid and releases gelatin, which sets the jelly as it cools.
White sugar-candy
Adds sweetness to balance the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and cuts the sweetness.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, champagne. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes