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Easter Jelly
Color calf's-foot jelly a bright yellow by steeping a small quantity of dried saffron leaves in the water. Pare lemons in long strips about the width of a straw, boil in water until tender, throw them into a rich syrup, and boil until clear. Make a blanc-mange of cream, color one-third pink with poke-berry syrup, one-third green with spinach, and leave the other white. Pour out eggs from a hole a half inch in diameter in the large end, wash and drain the shells carefully, set them in a basin of salt to fill, and pour in the blancmange slowly through a funnel, and place the dish in a refrigerator for several hours. When ready to serve, select a round, shallow dish about as large as a hen's nest, form the jelly in it as a lining, scatter the strips of lemon peel over the edge like straws, remove the egg-shells carefully from the blanc-mange, and fill the nest with them. Mrs. C. M. Coates, Philadelphia.
This is a showpiece dessert — a saffron-yellow jelly nest holding blancmange "eggs" moulded in real eggshells — and one of its three colourings is a poisonous plant. The rest of the construction is sound period confectionery, but the recipe as printed cannot be followed.
- Poke-berry syrup is the problemPokeweed (Phytolacca americana) berries contain phytolaccatoxin and related saponins, and the seeds are the most concentrated part. Ingestion causes severe vomiting, cramping and diarrhoea, with children particularly at risk; the juice was used as a dye and ink far more often than as food. No amount of boiling into syrup removes the toxin.
- Why it appeared here anywayNineteenth-century cooks reached for pokeberry, cochineal and beet for pink long before commercial food colours were reliable or affordable. Its inclusion in a household book is a reminder that "traditional" does not mean "tested." Use a current blancmange recipe with modern colouring if you want the effect.
- The eggshellsFilling blown shells puts a raw, hard-to-clean shell surface in direct contact with the blancmange, which is then set in the shell and chilled rather than heated again. Even setting the pokeberry aside, that is a possible route for Salmonella onto a ready-to-eat dessert.
- Calf's-foot jellyThe base is a stock gelatine, made by long-boiling split calves' feet and clarifying the result — the forerunner of powdered gelatine, and a staple of Victorian invalid cookery. It is rarely made from scratch now, and this recipe assumes the jelly has already been made elsewhere.
- Saffron and spinachBoth are legitimate colourings and still used. Saffron steeped in warm water gives the yellow; spinach green was traditionally made by pounding leaves, heating the juice until the colour coagulated, and straining off the green curd.
Easter dishes shaped as nests and eggs run right through European confectionery, and this one belongs to the Victorian fashion for the moulded, architectural dessert — jelly as sculpture rather than as pudding. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, which grew out of an Ohio church-compiled collection and appeared in an 1877 Minneapolis edition, is full of such signed set-pieces; the attribution to Mrs. C. M. Coates of Philadelphia is the book's usual way of crediting a correspondent. Filling blown eggshells with blancmange is a trick that appears in several nineteenth-century books, and it depended on something modern cooks no longer have: a household that broke eggs by the dozen and could spare a clean shell. The pokeberry colouring is the period detail that dates the recipe most sharply — a dye plant pressed into kitchen service before certified food colours made bright pink a matter of a bottle on the shelf.