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JELLY (a la Bacchante)
Take one pound of muscatel grapes, pick them from their stalks, and reserve sixteen or eighteen of the finest to set in the jelly. Put the remainder in a bowl, and crush them with a wooden spoon to extract the juice. Take an enamelled saucepan, and put into it three-quarters of a pint of hot water, one ounce of isinglass, the rind of half a lemon, the juice of a whole lemon, and four ounces of sugar, and simmer for ten minutes. Then take it off the fire, and let it cool for five minutes. Beat the whites and shells of two eggs in a wine-glassful of water, add the crushed grapes and their juice, and stir this into the contents of the saucepan. Replace on the fire, and stir till it simmers. Take out the spoon, and let it boil gently for ten minutes. Strain through a jelly-bag until clear and bright. Before it begins to jellify, pour in a pint bottle of champagne. Have ready a well-wetted mould with knobs. Put a grape into each knob, and pour in sufficient jelly to cover them. Set on ice, and as soon as firm, fill the mould with the remaining jelly. Set on ice for two hours before serving.
A Victorian wine jelly built on isinglass and clarified with egg, then loosened with a whole bottle of champagne. The hinge is the set: alcohol weakens gelatine, so the ratio matters more here than in a fruit jelly.
- Isinglass to gelatineOne ounce of isinglass was a firm setting dose for the roughly two imperial pints of liquid this makes, taking the "pint bottle" of champagne at 20 fl oz. Powdered gelatine is not a like-for-like swap; count on about 20-25 g (three to three and a half 7 g envelopes) bloomed in cold water, erring on the generous side because the champagne fights the set.
- Imperial measuresA pint here is 20 fl oz, not 16, so three-quarters of a pint is 15 fl oz. "A pint bottle of champagne" is ambiguous: in the wine trade a "pint" was a half-bottle (a reputed pint, about 13 fl oz), though the recipe may simply intend 20 fl oz of wine. A wine-glassful is conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz.
- The clarificationEgg whites with the crushed shells form a raft that traps the grape sediment. Once it comes to a simmer, take the spoon out and leave it alone for the full ten minutes; stirring breaks the raft and you will be straining cloudy liquid.
- Jelly bagA scalded, wetted jelly bag or a double layer of muslin in a sieve. Let it drip on its own weight, never squeeze, and pour the first cloudy runnings back through.
- When the champagne goes inOff the heat, once the strained jelly has cooled to lukewarm but before it thickens. Heating it would drive off both the alcohol and the aroma that the dish is named for. None of the fizz survives; this is a wine jelly, not a sparkling one.
- The grapesMuscatel grapes of the period had seeds and thick skins. Halve and seed the whole ones for setting into the mould, or use seedless muscat, and peel them if you want a clean look through the jelly.
- A mould with knobsA decorative copper or tin mould with hollow bosses around the sides. Any fluted or patterned mould works; the two-stage filling exists only to hold the grapes in place in the pattern, so it is worth doing.
- Setting"Set on ice" means packing the mould round with ice; a bowl of ice water is the nearest modern equivalent. In a refrigerator allow four hours or overnight rather than two. Unmould by dipping the base in warm water for a few seconds.
- YieldAbout 2 pints of jelly, serving six to eight.
The name points at Bacchus: a bacchante was a female follower of the wine god, and nineteenth-century menu French used such tags to signal that a dish was built on wine or grapes. Wine jellies were a fixture of late-Victorian supper tables, where a clear, glittering moulded jelly was as much a display of the cook's skill at clarifying as it was a dessert. Isinglass, made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, was the prestige setting agent of the period, prized because it gave a more brilliant, less cloudy jelly than commercial gelatine or a boiled calf's foot; it survives today mainly as a fining agent in brewing rather than in the kitchen.