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Hartshorn Jelly
Boil half a pound of hartshorn shavings in four pints of water for three hours. Strain through a jelly-bag and boil it again for half an hour with the thin rind of two lemons and one orange. When cool, add the juice, half a pound of sugar, a wine-glassful of brandy, and the beaten whites and crushed shells of six eggs. Boil the jelly again for a few minutes without stirring, and strain it until it is quite clear. Half an ounce of isinglass may be dissolved in it if it does not seem likely to stiffen. The above quantities are sufficient for nearly three pints of jelly.
A gelatin dessert from the era before packaged gelatine, built on an ingredient no longer sold for food. The method — clarifying with egg white and shell — is still the standard way to get a crystal-clear jelly.
- Hartshorn shavingsTurnings of deer antler, boiled for hours to extract their collagen; one of the household gelatine sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, alongside calf's foot and isinglass. They are not sold as food today. As a rough substitution, on the order of 1 oz (four ¼-oz envelopes) of powdered gelatine will set three pints; the packet directions are the safer guide, and a jelly meant to be turned out of a mould wants more rather than less.
- IsinglassA pure collagen product made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, used here as insurance if the hartshorn extraction was weak. Modern leaf or powdered gelatine does the same work with a predictable setting strength, which the original had no way to guarantee.
- The three-hour boilThat long extraction was necessary only to draw gelatine out of bone-hard shavings. With commercial gelatine there is nothing to extract; the flavour base is simply water, sugar, citrus peel and brandy, warmed until the sugar dissolves.
- Clarifying with eggThe hinge of the recipe. Whisk the whites and crushed shells into the liquid while it is cool, then bring it up to a boil without stirring — the coagulating albumen rises as a raft and traps the cloud. Stirring breaks the raft and you will never get it clear.
- StrainingA jelly-bag is a conical flannel or muslin bag hung over a bowl. Damp the cloth first, ladle the liquid through gently, and pour the first cloudy run back through the raft. Let it drip; squeezing forces sediment through.
- Peel and juicePare the rind thinly with no white pith, which turns the jelly bitter over a long boil. The juice goes in off the heat, as the original directs, because prolonged boiling flattens citrus aroma.
- Wine-glassfulIn Victorian usage a wine-glass is about 2 fl oz (60 ml), not a modern stemmed glass. Note that the original adds the brandy before the final short boil, so some of the alcohol will be driven off.
- YieldNearly three pints, as stated — enough for a large mould serving ten to twelve, or a dozen small glasses. Chill at least six hours before turning out.
Hartshorn jelly belongs to the long tradition of restorative jellies fed to invalids, nursing mothers and convalescents, and it appears in cookery books from the seventeenth century onward alongside calf's-foot jelly, which worked on the same principle of boiling collagen out of an animal part. The name is literal: hart's horn, the antler of a male red deer, sold by druggists as shavings. The same material, dry-distilled, gave the household ammonia known as spirits of hartshorn and the baking agent ammonium carbonate — still called hartshorn in some baking recipes today, though it has been made synthetically for well over a century. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled, commercially prepared gelatine and isinglass were widely available and jellies of this sort were sliding from the sickroom to the dessert table, where the brandy and the clarity mattered as much as the nourishment.