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Four-Fruit Jelly
The fruits selected for this excellent jelly are those which will yield the most juice. Take of fine red-currants, half a pound, of cherries, raspberries, and strawberries, each half that weight; get out all their juice over a slow fire, and strain it from the fruit. Make a syrup with three-quarters of a pound of loaf sugar, and as much water as, with the juice, will make a quart. Dissolve an ounce of isinglass, clarify, and simmer the whole over the fire for about five minutes. Add a glass of curacoa, and strain into a mould. The jelly should be iced before being turned out to serve. Probable cost, 2s. To clarify jelly, see CALF'S FOOT JELLY.
A Victorian moulded jelly built on fruit juice rather than pulp, so clarity is the whole point. Two things need translating before you start: the setting agent and the sugar.
- IsinglassDried sturgeon swim-bladder collagen, once the standard clear setting agent; what is sold under that name now is usually a brewing fining and not intended as a gelling dose. Substitute powdered or leaf gelatine, reckoning roughly half an ounce (two 1/4-oz envelopes, or about four leaves) to set a quart softly enough to eat with a spoon.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar broken from a cone, prized because it was cleaner than the brownish grocer's sugar of the day. Ordinary granulated sugar is its direct descendant; use 12 oz by weight.
- The quartAn imperial quart, 40 fl oz or about 1.14 litres, not the American 32 oz. Measure your strained juice first, then top up with water to that total before adding sugar.
- Fruit weights8 oz redcurrants and 4 oz each of cherries, raspberries and strawberries. Currants carry the pectin and the acid; the other three contribute chiefly perfume. The recipe itself gives juice yield, not acidity, as the reason for its choice of fruit.
- Drawing the juiceWarm the fruit slowly in a covered pan until it collapses, then let it drip through a jelly bag or a scalded cloth without squeezing. Forcing the pulp clouds the finished jelly, and cloudiness is the one fault a moulded jelly cannot hide.
- Five minutes, no moreOnce the gelatine is in, simmer only long enough to dissolve and marry everything. Prolonged boiling weakens gelatine's set and dulls the fresh fruit flavour the recipe is chasing.
- A glass of curacoaA wine glass, about 2 fl oz of orange curacao. Add it off the heat so the alcohol and volatile orange oils survive; stirred into a boiling pan they largely disappear.
- "Iced"Chilled hard, originally in a mould packed in ice and salt. Four to six hours in the refrigerator does the same work. To turn out, dip the mould in hot water for three or four seconds only.
- YieldA quart mould, serving six to eight as a dessert on its own or with cream.
Moulded fruit jellies were a set piece of the Victorian dessert table, and their appeal was largely visual: a clear, jewel-coloured dome that stood up on the plate proved the cook had command of both her fruit and her setting agent. Isinglass, imported chiefly from Russia and made from sturgeon bladders, was the expensive clear alternative to boiling down calf's feet, which is why Cassell's cross-references its calf's-foot jelly entry for the clarifying method rather than repeating it. The recipe's logic is practical rather than poetic: the fruits are chosen, as the first line says outright, for juice yield, with redcurrants doing the structural work because they are the richest in acid and pectin, and the softer summer berries supplying scent. The splash of curacao and the quoted cost of two shillings place this in the comfortable middle-class household that Cassell's addressed through the 1870s and 1880s, where a shaped jelly was affordable ambition rather than aristocratic display.