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Madeira Wine Jelly
This very agreeable and excellent jelly takes its name from the wine used. The stock for it is made from calves' feet, and precisely in the same manner as the ordinary calf's foot jelly (see CALF'S FOOT JELLY). To a quart of the jelly, clarified, add half a pint or more of Madeira, and a glass of brandy; but as this will reduce the strength, a little isinglass, also clarified, say about half an ounce, will give it the necessary firmness. Time, one hour.
This is a finishing note rather than a full recipe: the work is in the calf's foot stock it sends you off to make, and this page only tells you how to turn that stock into a wine jelly. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- The quantities in modern termsThis is a British book, so the quart is an imperial one, 40 fl oz or a little over a litre, and half a pint of Madeira is 10 fl oz. "A glass of brandy" in Victorian cookery books is generally taken to mean a wineglassful, roughly 2 fl oz. Half an ounce of isinglass is about 14 g by weight.
- IsinglassIsinglass is a gelatin prepared from the swim bladders of fish, sold in leaf or shred form and dissolved in a little warm water, then strained. It is now almost entirely a fining agent for beer and wine. Powdered or leaf gelatine does the same job here, bloomed and dissolved separately before it goes in.
- Why the extra setting agent is neededThis is the hinge of the recipe. Alcohol interferes with gelatin's ability to form a network, and a cup and a half of wine and spirit added to a quart of jelly is enough to leave it slack. Do not skip the additional isinglass, and do not increase the Madeira beyond the stated amount without increasing the gelatine again.
- Add the wine off the heatThe stock and the dissolved isinglass should be warm enough to combine smoothly, but nothing here wants boiling once the Madeira and brandy are in. Heat drives off both the alcohol and the aromatics that are the entire point of the jelly.
- Clarify before, not afterThe instruction assumes your calf's foot stock has already been clarified with egg white and shell and strained through a jelly bag. Wine and brandy added to a cloudy stock cannot be clarified afterwards without cooking off the flavour.
- "Time, one hour"This appears to cover only the finishing stage, not the stock, which takes several hours of simmering. Once poured into a wetted mould, the jelly needs 4-6 hours in the refrigerator to set firm; overnight is safer.
- Madeira to buyA medium-dry Sercial or Verdelho suits a jelly better than the sweeter Bual and Malmsey, which can make it cloying alongside the sugar already in the stock. Avoid so-called cooking Madeira, which is often salted.
- YieldA quart of jelly plus the wine fills a 1.5-litre mould and serves eight to ten. The alcohol is not cooked off, so treat it as an adult dessert.
Wine jellies belong to the era when a clear, quivering, brilliantly transparent mould was the ultimate proof of a kitchen's competence: the cook had to boil calves' feet for hours, clarify the result with egg white until it ran crystalline through a flannel bag, and then set it without a cloud or a bubble. Madeira was among the fortified wines most favoured in British and American households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was reputed to survive long sea voyages; its nutty, slightly oxidised character stands up to sugar and gelatin in a way that lighter wines do not. The invalid cookery of the same period leaned heavily on these jellies as nourishment, which is part of why a dictionary of cookery lists so many variations of what is essentially the same stock differently flavoured. Commercial packet gelatine, available by the time this book appeared, would within a generation make the calf's foot stage obsolete for all but the most determined.