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Dessert

Claret Jelly

A gelatinous dessert made with claret wine, lemon juice, sugar, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and red currant 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

Make the jelly

  1. Combine water, sugar, gelatin, and lemon rind in a pan and stir until dissolved.

  2. Add lemon juice, claret, and red currant jelly.

  3. Whisk egg whites to a froth, crush the shells, and add them to the mixture. Whisk everything together and let it simmer for 5 minutes undisturbed.

  4. Strain the mixture through a hot jelly bag.

Set

  1. Do not use a metal mold for this jelly, as it will lose its color.

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. Lemon + red curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Egg whites and shells
Clarify the liquid by collecting cloudy particles as it simmers, leaving the jelly clear.
Leaf gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Claret
Gives the jelly its red wine flavor and deep color.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the jelly and balances the lemon juice's acidity.

The step that matters

Simmer undisturbed after adding the egg whites. Egg whites must be left to coagulate without stirring so they trap impurities and rise as a crust. Stirring breaks the crust and cloudies the jelly, so the clear straining step fails.

Swap the red currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, egg. 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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