Skip to main content
Dessert

Gelee De Fin De Champagne Rose

A pink gelatin dessert made with champagne, sugar, cochineal, isinglass, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Champagne and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Gelee De Fin De Champagne Rose

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Clarify the sugar with cochineal and pass it through a silk sieve.

  2. Mix the clarified sugar with isinglass when lukewarm.

  3. Add the pink champagne and lemon juice.

  4. Finish as usual.

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. Champagne + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  3. Sugar + champagnetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together424 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, 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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and body to the set gelée once clarified.
Isinglass
Gelatinous agent that sets the liquid into a firm, wobbly gelée.
Pink champagne
Supplies the main liquid and its aroma and flavour to the gelée.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.
Cochineal
Colours the gelée a pink shade.

The step that matters

Mixing the isinglass when lukewarm. If the sugar syrup is too hot, it can weaken the setting power of isinglass, while cooling it fully before adding the gelling agent can let it set unevenly. Lukewarm liquid lets the isinglass dissolve and distribute evenly before it sets.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Strawberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, champagne. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes