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Dessert

Claret Jelly

A gelatinous dessert made with claret wine, sugar, currant jelly, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Claret Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the gelatine in a white-lined pan for 30 minutes, or until soft.

Make the jelly

  1. Add the sugar, red currant jelly, claret, lemon juice, and rind.

  2. Simmer while stirring until the gelatine is melted.

  3. Boil for 5 minutes, then strain into a mold.

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. Red currant + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  3. Sugar + red curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

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
Provides the gel structure that lets the liquid set into a firm jelly.
Red currant jelly
Adds fruit flavour, colour, and some setting power from its natural pectin.
Claret
Supplies the main wine flavour, deep colour, and acidity.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the wine's acidity and dryness.
Lemon
Adds acidity and bright citrus aroma from the juice and rind.

The step that matters

Melt the gelatine gently, then boil briefly. Gelatine must dissolve fully while stirring over moderate heat. Prolonged hard boiling can weaken its gelling power, so the jelly may set softly. Stirring keeps it from sticking and scorching on the base of the pan.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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