Name: Coffee Jelly
Ingredients: ½ pound Mocha coffee, ground; 1 quart water; brandy to taste

Why it works: Coffee and brandy work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 213 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Coffee Jelly

Ingredients

½ pound Mocha coffee, ground
1 quart water
brandy to taste

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the decoction

Infuse the ground coffee in the water for 30 minutes.
Strain the coffee to obtain the decoction.
Add a little brandy to the decoction.

Set the jelly

Chill the mixture until it sets into a jelly.

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.

Coffee + brandytop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together213 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Mocha coffee: Supplies the strong coffee flavour and dark colour of the jelly.
Brandy: Adds aroma and a warming, slightly bitter note to the coffee flavour.

“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.