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Jellied Fruits
Take one box of Cox' gelatine; dissolve in hot water; add four lemons, sugar to taste. One can of fruit sweetened to taste and heated through. When thoroughly mixed, put the mixture on the stove and allow to stay there about five minutes, stirring with a steady motion all the time. Put in a pretty mould and set aside to congeal. When ice-cold dip the mould in boiling hot water and turn out on a flat dish. This makes a delicious dessert served with whipped cream. -Mrs. Judge Halley, Newton, Illinois.
A packaged-gelatine dessert from the era when moulded jellies were the showpiece of a supper table. The original assumes you know the box size and how much liquid to use, so both need pinning down.
- One box of Cox's gelatineJ. & G. Cox of Edinburgh sold gelatine in sheet and granulated form, and a box of this period is generally taken as roughly 1 ounce, enough to set about a quart of liquid. Four modern quarter-ounce envelopes (1 oz total) is the closest equivalent; if your brand advises differently, follow its ratio rather than the box count.
- The missing liquid quantityThe recipe never states how much liquid you are setting, which is its one genuine gap. Work backward from the gelatine: 1 ounce to roughly 3½–4 cups total, counting the water, the canned fruit syrup and the lemon juice together.
- Bloom before dissolvingGranulated gelatine sprinkled straight into hot water clumps. Soften it in about ½ cup cold water for five minutes first, then add the hot liquid and stir until no grains remain on a spoon back.
- Keep it below a boilThe five minutes on the stove is meant to dissolve and marry, not to cook. A hard boil, especially with this much lemon acid present, degrades gelatine's setting strength and can leave you with a syrup that never firms.
- Four lemonsThat is roughly ½ to ⅔ cup of juice, which is assertive. Strain out the pips and pulp, and taste for sugar after the lemon goes in rather than before.
- Canned fruit is not incidentalFresh pineapple, kiwi, papaya, mango and fig contain enzymes that break down gelatine and prevent setting. Canning heat destroys them, so a can is the safer choice here whatever the original writer's reasoning. Drain the fruit, keep the syrup as part of your liquid, and fold the fruit in once the jelly is thickened to raw egg white so it does not all sink.
- Chilling timeThe recipe says only to set it aside until ice-cold. Allow at least 4 to 6 hours, and overnight for a large mould, before attempting to turn it out.
- UnmouldingRinse the mould with cold water or oil it lightly before filling. To release, dip in hot water for only 5 to 10 seconds and run a thin knife around the rim; a long dip melts the surface and blurs the pattern.
- YieldA quart mould serves six to eight as dessert, with whipped cream as the original suggests.
Moulded fruit jellies belong to the moment when gelatine stopped being a day's work and became a grocery item. Earlier cooks extracted their own from calves' feet or isinglass, clarified it with egg white, and reserved the result for occasions; by the 1890s Scottish and American firms — Cox of Edinburgh, Nelson's, Knox of Johnstown in New York State — were selling dried sheets and powders by the box, and "one box of Cox' gelatine" was as ordinary a unit of measure as a cup of flour. The result was a flood of jellied desserts in community cookbooks of this kind, which looked expensive and cost almost nothing. Canned fruit did the rest of the work, letting a cook in Newton, Illinois, produce peaches or pears in February. The attribution to Mrs. Judge Halley suggests how such recipes carried their authority: the name signals whose table the dish had come from.