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Dessert

Coffee Jelly

A chilled dessert made from coffee, gelatin, sugar, and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Coffee Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the jelly

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water.

  2. Mix strong coffee with boiling water and sugar.

  3. Heat the mixture until it just comes to a boil.

  4. Strain the mixture.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream, either whipped, frozen, or plain, 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.

  1. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

Gelatine
Sets the coffee liquid into a wobbly jelly as it cools.
Strong coffee
Gives the jelly its coffee flavour and dark colour.
Sugar
Sweetens the coffee to balance its bitterness.

The step that matters

Heat until it just comes to a boil. Stopping at the first boil keeps the coffee's aroma fresh. Prolonged or rolling boiling drives off volatile flavour compounds and can weaken gelatine's setting power, so the jelly may come out soft or flat.

“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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