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Dessert

Wine Jelly

A gelatin dessert made with wine, sugar, lemon juice, and optional fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Wine Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in 1 quart of boiling water.

  2. Add the sugar, cold water, sherry, and lemon juice to the mixture.

  3. Pour into a mold that has been wet with cold water.

Finish

  1. Mix in Malaga grapes and sliced oranges as desired.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Grape + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Sherry + grapetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together229 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Sherry + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together823 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Lemon + grapetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,412 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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, sliceable jelly.
Sherry
Adds the wine flavour and alcohol that define the jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and balances the acidity of the lemon and sherry.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and flavour of the jelly.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatine fully in boiling water. Gelatine only sets properly when every granule has dissolved completely. Undissolved bits leave weak spots and grainy texture in the finished jelly.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, sherry, lemon, orange. 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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