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Cranberry and Ground Rice Jelly
Draw out a pint of cranberry-juice by putting the fruit and two or three cloves into a closely-covered jar, placing the jar in a saucepan of cold water on a moderate fire, and simmering gently for about half an hour. Mix the juice with three table-spoonfuls of ground rice and two of sugar, boil it gently until it thickens, and pour it into a mould which has been immersed in cold water. When cold, turn it out, and eat it with a little cream. A quarter of an hour to boil with the rice. Sufficient for four persons.
A starch-set fruit mould of the plainest Victorian kind, closer to a firm pudding than a gelatine jelly. The two things to watch are the strength of the set and the sweetness, both of which sit below modern expectations.
- Ground rice is not quite rice flourGround rice is rice milled to a fine semolina-like grit, still sold in British shops; modern rice flour is finer and will thicken slightly faster. Either works, but slake it with a little cold juice before adding it to the hot juice or it will lump.
- How much fruit for a pint of juiceThe recipe never says. Reckon on 1 1/2 to 2 lb of fresh or frozen cranberries to yield a pint (20 fl oz British, 16 fl oz US) of juice after gentle steaming and straining.
- The jar-in-a-saucepan methodThis is a water bath, which extracts juice gently without adding water to dilute it. A covered heatproof bowl or jar standing in barely simmering water for 30 minutes will burst the fruit and release its juice; strain through a sieve without pressing hard if you want it bright rather than cloudy.
- "A moderate fire"On a modern hob this means the water around the jar should shiver, not roll. A hard boil drives off liquid and does nothing to speed extraction.
- Two tablespoons of sugar is very littleCranberries are among the sharpest of fruits, and Victorian tables often took acid preserves alongside meat. Taste the sweetened juice before you thicken it; many modern palates will want more, perhaps 4 to 6 tablespoons, and the extra sugar may soften the set a little.
- Expect a soft setThree tablespoons of ground rice to a pint is on the light side for turning out. Cook the full quarter hour so the starch is fully swollen and the raw cereal taste is gone, chill at least four hours, and if you want a mould that stands up cleanly, use four tablespoons.
- Wetting the mouldImmersing the mould in cold water leaves a film that stops the starch gripping the metal or china. Do not oil it instead; oil clouds the surface of a fruit jelly.
- The clovesTwo or three whole cloves in a pint is assertive. Remove them with the pulp at straining, and drop to one if you would rather taste the fruit.
- YieldFour small portions, as stated, served cold with pouring cream.
Starch-thickened moulds like this belong to the long British tradition of blancmange, which by the nineteenth century had drifted from its medieval meaning of a white dish of pounded almonds and capon to mean almost any sweet set with rice, arrowroot, cornflour or isinglass. Ground rice, often said to be among the cheapest of these thickeners, appears throughout Cassell's in puddings, moulds and invalid cookery, where a bland, easily digested starch was thought suitable for the sick. Cranberries reached British kitchens largely as an import: the small native European cranberry was gathered in some northern districts, but the large American berry, shipped in barrels of water that kept it sound for months, was the one sold in Victorian greengrocers and the one usually meant in a book of this date. Its sharpness explains the cloves and the cream, both of which soften a fruit that many nineteenth-century writers seem to have treated as a relish for meat rather than a dessert in its own right.