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Maraschino Jelly
Squeeze the juice from an orange, lemon, and peach. Strain and add it, with a table-spoonful of orange-flower water, to twelve ounces of fine sugar, on which the rind of part of a lemon has been rubbed off. Dissolve the sugar with a wine-glassful of water, and boil until it is reduced to a rich syrup, when add it to a pint and a half of good strong calf's foot stock, half a pint of maraschino, and the frothed whites and crushed shells of eight eggs. Simmer for a few minutes, then pass the liquid through the usual jelly-bag until quite clear. While in a fluid state, but cool, take some fine rich-coloured strawberries, previously freed from their stems, throw them in, and mould the jelly. The kernel of the peach, crushed, or a bitter almond, may be simmered with the jelly. Time to simmer, ten to fifteen minutes. Sufficient for two moulds.
This is a Victorian clarified wine jelly, and the closing sentence is the reason it cannot be reproduced. The rest is offered as a reading aid, not as working instructions.
- The peach kernel and the bitter almondBoth contain amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted, which is what this recipe directs. The kernel is simmered with the jelly for ten to fifteen minutes and then strained out with the clarification, but the instruction gives no assurance that this destroys the glycoside. Raw bitter almonds are barred from food sale in a number of countries, including the United States, for this reason.
- No measured doseThe recipe says "a bitter almond" or "the kernel of the peach" with no weight and no indication of size or variety, and cyanogenic content varies widely between kernels. There is no way to read a safe quantity out of the instruction, and the yield is two moulds shared among many servings. If you want an almond note in a jelly, use a current recipe with commercial almond extract.
- Calf's foot stockThe setting agent. Calves' feet were simmered for hours to yield a strong gelatine broth, then chilled and the fat lifted off; a pint and a half of it is what makes the jelly stand. Modern kitchens meet this quantity with sheet or powdered gelatine, and butchers rarely carry the feet.
- Egg whites and shellsThese are the clarification, not an ingredient. Frothed whites and crushed shells are simmered in, trap the cloudy solids as they coagulate, and the whole is strained through the jelly-bag (usually flannel) until it runs clear; the bag is conventionally left to drip rather than squeezed.
- Archaic measuresA wine-glassful is roughly 2 fl oz; twelve ounces of sugar is by weight, about 340 g or a little under 1 3/4 cups. Orange-flower water is still sold in Middle Eastern groceries. "Maraschino" here means the dry Dalmatian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries.
- Rubbing the rindRubbing a lemon against a sugar loaf to strip the zest oil was standard practice before microplanes; the sugar carries the flavour into the syrup. It is a technique worth knowing even though this particular jelly is not.
Maraschino was distilled around Zara, on the Dalmatian coast, from the marasca — a small sour cherry — with its crushed stones, and by the nineteenth century Luxardo and Drioli bottles were available to English cooks for trifles, ices and jellies. Its cherry-kernel bitterness explains the recipe's suggestion of reinforcing it with a peach kernel or bitter almond, the same benzaldehyde note that we now get from extract. Clear calf's-foot jellies like this one sat at the grand end of the dessert table, and the technique the recipe sets out — long-boiled stock, egg-white clarification, the flannel bag — is laborious enough to be worth learning once. The strawberries suspended in a half-set jelly are pure display, the kind of thing a mould was bought to show off.