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Dessert

Coffee Jelly

A chilled gelatin dessert flavored with coffee, sugar, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,344 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Coffee Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water for 2 hours.

Make the jelly

  1. Pour boiling water over the soaked gelatine and stir until dissolved.

  2. Add sugar, coffee, and lemon juice to the mixture.

  3. Pour into a mold and refrigerate until set.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream and sugar.

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

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

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

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

  3. Coffee + lemontop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together578 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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 coffee liquid into a firm, wobbly jelly when chilled.
Coffee
Provides the main flavour and liquid base of the jelly.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the bitterness of the coffee.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the coffee flavour.

The step that matters

Dissolving the gelatine. Gelatine must be fully dissolved in hot water before the other ingredients are added. Undissolved granules can leave lumps or weak spots, so the jelly may not set evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, sugar. 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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