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Apple Solid
Melt a heaped table-spoonful of isinglass in a little water. Take half a pint of nicely-flavoured apple-pulp, mix it well with half a pint of cream, then add the dissolved isinglass and sugar to sweeten it agreeably. Let it stand till nearly cold; add a glass of wine or a table-spoonful of brandy, pour into a buttered mould, and keep it in a cool place until the next day. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, 2s. 6d., exclusive of the brandy.
A cold set cream from the days before packet gelatine, and the only real obstacles are the setting agent and the imperial pint.
- IsinglassIsinglass is a collagen gelatine made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish; it survives today mainly as a fining agent for beer and wine. Leaf gelatine or unflavoured granulated gelatine does the same job in a dessert like this.
- How much to useThe quantity is genuinely ambiguous: isinglass came in shreds, sheets and powders of very different strengths, and a heaped tablespoon of one is not a heaped tablespoon of another. Judge by liquid volume instead, following the packet directions for setting roughly 2 1/2 cups of a cream mixture to an unmoulding firmness.
- The pintA British imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, or 1 1/4 US cups. The finished mixture is about 2 1/2 cups plus the sugar and spirit.
- Apple-pulpThis means thick, smooth, unsweetened stewed apple, closer to a puree than a sauce. Cook the apples down and sieve them, and drive off enough water that the pulp mounds on a spoon, or the solid will be watery and slack.
- The hinge: temperature when combiningDissolved gelatine seizes into threads if it hits cold cream, and cream can split if the apple is hot. Have both apple and gelatine warm but not hot when they meet, then fold in the cream and cool the whole mixture together, stirring now and then so the apple does not sink.
- Adding the wine lastThe recipe adds the brandy or wine only when the mixture is nearly cold; alcohol weakens a gel, and late addition also preserves the flavour, though the book does not say which reason it had in mind. A glass of wine in recipes of this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz.
- The mouldButter sets hard in the cold and can mark the surface; a film of flavourless oil releases more cleanly. Chill overnight as directed, then dip the mould briefly in warm water to turn it out.
- YieldFive or six persons, as the original says. The stated cost of 2s 6d, exclusive of the brandy, was not a trifling sum, which puts this at the company-dish end rather than the everyday.
This recipe demonstrates the basic Victorian jelly-cream: a flavoured pulp, cream, a setting agent and a spirit, chilled in a shaped mould. Isinglass was the fashionable setting agent of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prized because it was clearer and less flavoured than the gelatine cooks boiled out of calves' feet themselves, and it was sold by grocers in shreds and sheets of wildly varying quality. Commercial powdered gelatine, standardised and cheap, displaced it from the kitchen over the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which is why recipes like this one read as slightly opaque now: the writer could assume a household knew its own isinglass.