Home › Food for the Sick › JELLICE
JELLICE
One-half tea-spoon of currant, lemon or cranberry jelly put into a goblet, beat well with two table-spoons water, fill up with ice-water, and you have a refreshing drink for a fever patient.
A one-glass invalid drink, essentially a hand-mixed jelly cordial. The only technique that matters is getting the jelly fully dissolved before the cold water goes in.
- The gobletA goblet of this period is roughly tumbler-sized, so this makes one serving; the ratio scales directly if you want a pitcher.
- Dissolve first, dilute secondBeat the half teaspoon of jelly with the two tablespoons of water until no lumps remain. Jelly will not disperse in ice-water; it seizes into threads and sinks.
- Which jellyCurrant, lemon and cranberry are all tart fruits, which is presumably the point. Sweetness varies a good deal between jellies, so start with a scant half teaspoon and taste before adding more.
- StrengthHalf a teaspoon in a full tumbler is very faint by contemporary palates, which suggests barely flavoured water was the intention; a full teaspoon is closer to a modern squash or cordial.
- Ice-water, not iceRead this as water chilled with ice rather than cubes dropped in the glass, which keeps the dilution predictable; cubes will thin the drink as they melt.
"Food for the Sick" chapters were a fixture of nineteenth-century American household manuals, and they read as a nursing handbook as much as a cookbook: gruels, beef tea, barley water, wine whey, toast water, and thin fruit drinks like this one. Before intravenous fluids, keeping a fevered patient drinking was one of the few interventions available at home, and the work fell to whoever ran the kitchen. Tart fruit jellies were a common flavouring, presumably because a household that put up currant and cranberry jelly in season would have it to hand, it kept without refrigeration, and its acidity was thought to be cooling in fever raral notions of hot and cold foods rather than to anything demonstrated. The name "Jellice" appears to be simply jelly plus ice, in the same spirit as the era's other coined invalid drinks.