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Dessert

English Gelatine

A simple gelatin dessert made with gelatine, water, sugar, lemon juice, and optional wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

English Gelatine

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Soak the gelatine in 1 pint of cold water for 10 minutes.

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

  3. Stir in 1 cup of sugar and the juice of 1 lemon or your preferred spice/essence.

  4. Boil for 1 minute.

  5. For invalids, omit the lemon and use 2 cups of wine after boiling.

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

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

  3. Sugar + winetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

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

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, wobbly gel as it cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the gelatin.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright flavour to cut the sweetness.

The step that matters

Soak the gelatine in cold water before dissolving. Gelatine must first absorb cold water so its granules hydrate evenly. Adding it straight to hot liquid can leave lumps and weaken the set.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, wine. 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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