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Calf's Foot Jelly, Maraschino
Take one quart of clear calf's foot stock. Proceed according to the directions given for making calf's foot jelly, remembering only to omit the sherry, and to rub the rind of two lemons on the sugar before it is added to the stock. When it has run through the jelly-bag and is quite clear, add two glasses of maraschino to it, and pour a little of the jelly into a mould; let it set, then fill the mould with alternate layers of jelly, and either fresh strawberries or preserved peaches. Put it in a cool place, and when it has set, turn it out of the mould. Time to set, two hours with ice, ten or twelve without. Probable cost, 1s.per pint, without the maraschino. A pint and a half mould will be sufficient for five or six persons.
A moulded wine jelly of the sort that closed a Victorian dinner, built on stock boiled from calves' feet rather than a packet of gelatine. Most of the work is in the clarifying, and most of the risk is in the setting.
- Calf's foot stockThe recipe assumes stock made by an earlier method and gives no quantities. Two split calves' feet long-simmered in several quarts of water, then strained and chilled, will give a stock that sets firm and can be scraped free of fat. Butchers will still order feet; if you substitute gelatine, start at about 1/2 oz (15 g) of powdered gelatine to a quart of liquid and adjust, as ratios vary by brand.
- Two glasses of maraschinoThe recipe says only 'glasses'. A wineglass is conventionally reckoned at about 2 to 2.5 fl oz, so somewhere around 4 to 5 fl oz in all. That much spirit will soften the set noticeably; if you are working from gelatine rather than a strong foot stock, allow extra.
- What maraschino isA clear, dryish liqueur distilled from marasca cherries and their crushed stones, not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Luxardo and Maraska are the versions closest to what Cassell's meant.
- Rubbing the rind on the sugarRubbing whole lemons against the sugar lumps until the sugar is yellow and damp draws the oil out of the zest without any pith or fibre. It is the same principle as an oleo-saccharum, and it gives a cleaner lemon flavour than grated peel steeped in the stock.
- Clarifying and the jelly-bagThe referenced method whisks in egg whites and crushed shells, brings the jelly just to a boil to raise a crust, then pours it through a scalded flannel bag without squeezing. Pour the first cloudy run back through the bag; only the second or third pass comes through bright.
- Add the liqueur off the heatThe maraschino goes in after clarifying and after the jelly has cooled to lukewarm. Boiling it with the stock drives off the alcohol and most of the aroma, which is the whole point of the dish.
- Layering the fruitEach layer must be nearly set before the next is added, or the fruit floats and the layers bleed. Strawberries and preserved peaches both work; avoid fresh pineapple, papaya or kiwi, whose enzymes will stop a gelatine jelly setting at all.
- Setting and turning outTen to twelve hours "without ice" assumes a cold larder; a modern refrigerator will set a 1.5-pint mould in four to six hours, overnight for certainty. To unmould, dip the mould in hot water for three or four seconds only and invert onto a wetted plate so the jelly can be slid into place.
- YieldA pint and a half is 30 fl oz, about 850 ml, given here as five or six portions.
Calf's foot jelly was the great convalescent food of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a way of extracting gelatine from bone and connective tissue in a kitchen that had no packet alternative; it appears in household books as both invalid nourishment and, dressed with wine and fruit, a dinner-party sweet. The maraschino version is squarely the second sort. Maraschino is generally traced to the Dalmatian coast around Zadar, where the small sour marasca cherry was distilled with its crushed stones to give the liqueur its faint bitter-almond note, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was a standard flavouring in British and French confectionery. Cassell's quoting a cost of a shilling a pint before the liqueur tells you what kind of household it addressed: one where the labour of boiling feet all day and straining the jelly through the bag was cheap, and the imported spirit was the expensive part.