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Dessert

Solid Tea

Solid Tea is a gelatin dessert made with milk, tea, sugar, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and tea work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 738 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Solid Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Melt the gelatine in the milk over low heat.

  2. Add the strong tea and sugar, mixing well.

  3. Strain the mixture and pour it into a mold.

Set

  1. Refrigerate until set.

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. Milk + teatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together738 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Tea + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,204 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Provides the setting structure that turns the liquid into a firm, sliceable solid.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that the gelatine sets.
Strong tea
Adds the main flavour and colour to the set dish.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the bitterness of the tea.

The step that matters

Melt the gelatine in the milk over low heat.. Gelatine only sets once it is fully dissolved, so it must be stirred until no granules remain. High heat or boiling can weaken its setting power, so keep the heat low.

“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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