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Jelly, Cream
Put three pints of water into a saucepan with a quarter of a pound of hartshorn-shavings, and boil gently until the liquid will jelly. This may be easily ascertained by taking a little in a spoon, and letting it get cold. When sufficiently boiled, strain it, and add half a pint of cream, two table-spoonfuls of rose or orange-flower water, two table-spoonfuls of sherry, and two ounces of sifted sugar. Boil all together gently for five minutes, stirring all the time, to prevent the mixture curdling. When cool, pour it into a damp mould, turn it out as soon as it is stiff, and pour over it half a pint of cream, flavoured according to taste. Time, about three hours to simmer the shavings. Sufficient for a quart mould.
A Victorian moulded cream jelly set with hartshorn rather than sheet or powdered gelatine. The whole thing hinges on the second cooking: once the cream and sherry go in, the mixture must never reach a real boil or it will curdle and no amount of stirring will bring it back.
- Hartshorn-shavingsRasped deer antler, one of several household gelling agents before packet gelatine, sold by chemists and long gone from shops. The three pints are meant to reduce to something under two, since the strained liquid has to fill a quart mould alongside half a pint of cream; to work from a modern larder, set the flavoured liquid with about 3 to 4 envelopes of powdered gelatine per quart, which should be firm enough to unmould.
- The jelly testThe spoonful cooled on a saucer is the only reliable gauge here, and it is still the right test with gelatine. It should be tacky and hold a smear rather than run, since a jelly that will turn out of a mould must be noticeably firmer than one eaten from a glass.
- Five minutes, gently"Boil all together gently" means a bare tremble rather than a rolling boil. Cream with sherry and sugar can separate if boiled hard; keep it just below a simmer and stir continuously for the five minutes the recipe allows.
- Flower watersTwo tablespoons of rose or orange-flower water suited the distillates of the period, which are usually reckoned to have been weaker than some of what is sold now. Modern rose water and orange blossom water vary a good deal in strength, so start with a small amount and taste, or the jelly will read as soap.
- Sifted sugarCaster or superfine sugar, sifted to break lumps. Two ounces is about a quarter cup, which is restrained by modern standards for a sweet jelly.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, so use about 1 1/4 cups of cream in the jelly and the same again for pouring over.
- Damp mouldRinsing the mould with cold water and not drying it is what lets the jelly release. Chill it four hours or overnight, then dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a wetted plate so the jelly can be slid into position.
- YieldA quart mould serves six to eight as a dessert course, with the second half pint of cream poured around rather than over if you want the shape to stay visible.
Hartshorn shavings are the reason this recipe reads so strangely now. Before commercial gelatine became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century, cooks extracted their own setting agent by long-boiling collagen-rich material: calves' feet, isinglass from fish swim bladders, or rasped hart's horn, the antler of the red deer. The same material, burnt and refined, gave sal volatile and the baker's ammonia still called hartshorn in some German recipes, so the word survived in two quite separate kitchen contexts. Flavouring the resulting jelly with rose or orange-flower water and a little sherry is an older habit that reaches back past Victorian cookery into the flower-water sweets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; by the time Cassell's was compiled, packet gelatine was already displacing shavings.