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Coffee Jelly
Pour a pint of boiling milk through a muslin bag containing three ounces of freshly-ground coffee. Put one ounce and a half of soaked gelatine into a saucepan with a pint of cold milk, an inch of stick cinnamon, and two table-spoonfuls of sugar. Let it boil, and stir it until the gelatine is dissolved. Mix the yolks of two eggs with the coffee, strain the milk and gelatine upon it, pour it into a mould which has been immersed in cold water, and let it remain in a cool place until stiff. It will stiffen in about twenty-four hours. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for rather more than a quart of jelly.
A Victorian gelatine sweet that reads simply enough, but the method leaves two egg yolks essentially uncooked in a dish that then sits for a day. The notes below explain the problem and place the rest of the instructions in context.
- The yolks are never cookedThe yolks are stirred into the coffee-infused milk, and the boiled gelatine milk is then strained onto them. Mixing roughly equal volumes of just-boiled and standing milk cannot be relied on to bring the yolks to a safe temperature, and the recipe gives no temperature or holding time. Nothing later in the recipe reheats it.
- Then it stands for twenty-four hoursThe recipe directs only 'a cool place' — in this period a larder rather than a refrigerator — for a full day while it sets. A sweetened milk and egg mixture standing that long with raw yolk in it is a genuine Salmonella risk. Use a current recipe if you want coffee jelly of this style.
- Straining is not a safeguardPassing the gelatine milk through a strainer removes the cinnamon stick and any lumps. It does nothing to the eggs, and the phrase "let it boil" applies only to the gelatine milk before it meets them.
- Gelatine strength has changedGelatine quantity -- An ounce and a half to two pints of liquid is a heavy hand by modern standards, where a fraction of that weight would set the same volume.
- The coffee is an infusion, not a brewThree ounces of ground coffee steeped by pouring a pint of boiling milk through a muslin bag gives a strong milk infusion rather than anything resembling brewed coffee. It was one domestic way of flavouring a cream or custard with coffee.
- Yield and costThe recipe gives 'rather more than a quart' of jelly, set in a single mould. The 1s 3d is the book's own probable-cost guide to household expense.
Coffee jelly belongs to the Victorian enthusiasm for moulded gelatine, which shifted over the nineteenth century from the laborious business of boiling calves' feet to something a cook could buy in sheets or packets and set in a mould. Flavouring by steeping ground coffee in hot milk through a muslin bag was one approach of the kind also used for coffee creams and ices. The recipe's twenty-four hour setting time is a reminder that a cool larder, not a refrigerator, was the cold storage available to many households, and that a jelly was a dish planned a day ahead.