Name: Mabiiira Jelly
Ingredients: 1 quart calf's-foot jelly; ½ ounce isinglass; ½ pint good Madeira wine; 1 glass brandy; sugar to taste

Why it works: Madeira wine and brandy work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 120 recipes. The science ↓

Mabiiira Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

Clarify the calf's-foot jelly as directed in the recipe for clarifying stock and jelly.
While the jelly is warm, dissolve the isinglass in it.
Add the Madeira, brandy, and sugar to sweeten the jelly to your liking.

Set and serve

Pour the mixture into molds and cool it.
Serve the jelly cold.

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.

Madeira wine + brandytop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together120 recipes
Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together11,939 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Madeira wine + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together343 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Brandy and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Isinglass: Sets the liquid into a firm jelly as it cools.
Calf's-foot jelly: Provides the gelatin base that gives the dessert its body.
Madeira wine: Adds aromatic depth and a rich, slightly sweet flavour.
Brandy: Adds warmth and aroma to the jelly.

“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.