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Orange Jelly
Two quarts water, four ounces gelatine, nine oranges and three lemons, a pound sugar, whites of three eggs; soak gelatine in a pint of water, boil the three pints water and sugar together, skim well, add dissolved gelatine, orange and lemon juice, and beaten whites; let come to a boil, skim off carefully all scum, boil until it jellies, and pour jelly into mold. Strain, scum and add to mold.
A clarified citrus jelly of the sort meant to be turned out of a fluted mold and served cold. Two things in the original need correcting for modern ingredients: the quantity of gelatine and the instruction to boil until it jellies.
- Gelatine quantityFour ounces of the gelatine sold in the 1870s is not the equivalent of four ounces of modern powdered gelatine, which is stronger and more consistent. For two quarts of liquid, about 1 oz of powdered gelatine (roughly four ¼-oz envelopes) gives a jelly firm enough to unmold; the full four ounces would set very stiff indeed.
- It will not jelly on the stoveGelatine sets only as it cools, so "boil until it jellies" cannot be followed literally. Bring the mixture just to a boil to clarify it, then stop; prolonged boiling breaks the gelatine down and weakens the set. Citrus juice, being acidic, works against the set as well.
- SoakingSoak the gelatine in a pint of cold water until swollen — 5 to 10 minutes for powder, longer for sheets — before it goes into the hot syrup. Dumping dry gelatine into hot liquid gives lumps that never disperse.
- The egg-white clarificationThe beaten whites are there to trap cloudiness, not to flavor anything. Add them to the warm, not boiling, liquid, bring it up gently without stirring once the raft forms, and lift the coagulated scum off rather than breaking it up.
- StrainingThe last line means strain the jelly through a scalded flannel jelly bag or several layers of damp cheesecloth, letting it drip without squeezing, then skim once more and add the strained liquid to what is already in the mold. Squeezing the bag pushes fine sediment through and clouds the whole thing.
- Juice quantitiesNine oranges give roughly 2½ to 3 cups of juice and three lemons about ⅓ to ½ cup, depending on size. Strain out pulp and seeds before adding.
- SweetnessA pound of sugar is about 2¼ cups. Against that much citrus juice the result is on the tart side; taste the syrup before molding and adjust while it is still warm.
- Molding and yieldTwo quarts fills a large mold or eight to ten individual ones, serving ten to twelve. Chill at least 6 hours, or overnight for a large mold, and unmold by dipping the outside briefly in hot water and inverting onto a wetted plate.
Molded jellies were a set piece of the mid-Victorian table, and the arrival of commercial packaged gelatine in the second half of the nineteenth century is what put them within reach of an ordinary household. Before that, a clear jelly meant boiling down calves' feet or isinglass and clarifying the result over hours, work that marked a dish as ambitious. Buckeye Cookery, generally traced to an Ohio compilation of household recipes and often said to have begun as a fundraising effort, sits right at that transition: it still assumes the cook owns a flannel jelly bag and knows how to raise an egg-white raft, but it buys the gelatine by the ounce. The nine oranges are worth noticing too, in a Midwestern kitchen in winter.