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Marble Jelly
Prepare for carrying out this receipe a clear, colourless jelly, and oil well a mould, which nearly fill with rough lumps of bright-coloured jelly of varied sizes. Arrange the lumps like rock-work, and tastefully as to colour. Orange, strawberry, and apple jelly do well for this. Run the colourless jelly, when cool, but in a liquefied state, into the mould, and when set, turn out. We give the recipe for SILVER JELLY, which is the one we would recommend, as being without colour. Rub off the essence from the rind of two lemons upon lumps of sugar. Beat the whites of six eggs to a froth, and crush the shells. Simmer over the fire an ounces and a half of the best isinglass, dissolved in a pint of water, adding the sugar, eggs, etc., and half a pint of lemon-juice, strained. When the jelly has simmered for a few minutes, pour in a pint of maraschino, and simmer a few minutes longer, when it must be allowed to stand, without being disturbed, before it is passed through the jelly-bag. If not clear the first time, return it to the bag--it should in the end be like crystal. From ten to twelve ounces of sugar will be required to sweeten this jelly.
Two recipes in one: a method for the marbled effect, and the clear "silver jelly" used to bind it. The whole thing turns on temperature control at the moment of assembly.
- The hinge: pour cool, not warmThe clear jelly must be liquid but barely above room temperature when it goes into the mould. Any warmer and it will melt the edges of the coloured lumps, bleeding the colours into a uniform muddy pink instead of leaving crisp marbling.
- Isinglass to gelatineIsinglass is a dried fish swim bladder, historically sturgeon, still sold for fining beer but not practical here. An ounce and a half set roughly two and a half pints of liquid in this recipe; modern powdered or leaf gelatine sets about a pint per quarter ounce for a firm turn-out mould, so figure something in the region of 18 g total, more if you keep the full quantity of liqueur. The recipe already dissolves the isinglass in water first; do the same with gelatine, blooming it in cold water before it goes near heat.
- The egg-white raftThe whites and crushed shells are a clarification raft, not an ingredient. Whisk them into the cool liquid before heating, bring it up slowly without stirring once it clouds, and let it stand off the heat so the coagulated raft carries the haze upward. Stirring at that point ruins the whole point of the exercise.
- The jelly bagA doubled length of scalded muslin or a fine cloth in a sieve does the same work. Let it drip; squeezing forces fines through and returns you to the cloudy jelly you just spent an hour clearing.
- MaraschinoOriginally a liqueur distilled from marasca cherries and their kernels, with a distinct bitter-almond note, not the sweet syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Luxardo and similar bottles are close to what was meant. A full pint in this quantity is a great deal of alcohol and will noticeably soften the set, so increase the gelatine if you keep it, or cut it to a few tablespoons.
- Sugar by weightTen to twelve ounces is 285-340 g, which reads sweet by modern taste against half a pint of lemon juice; the acid and the liqueur carry it, but taste the liquid before setting since nothing can be adjusted afterwards.
- Rubbing the rindDragging sugar lumps over a lemon strips the oil from the zest without any bitter pith. A microplaned zest rubbed into granulated sugar and left ten minutes achieves the same aromatic result.
- Oiling the mouldA thin film of a flavourless oil, wiped almost dry with kitchen paper, is enough. Too much collects in the crevices and leaves a dull, greasy skin on the finished surface. Unmould by dipping the outside briefly in hot water and inverting onto a wetted plate so the jelly can be slid into position.
- YieldRoughly two and a half pints of clear jelly plus the coloured lumps fills a large mould serving ten to twelve. It needs at least six hours in the refrigerator, and overnight is safer for a shape this size.
Moulded jellies were the centrepiece architecture of the nineteenth-century table, and books like Cassell's devote pages to them because they demonstrated skill that could not be faked: a cloudy jelly announced a careless cook. Marble, macedoine and ribbon jellies were the show pieces of that tradition, and the technique here of setting coloured fragments into a colourless suspension is generally traced to the Regency and early Victorian confectioners working in the wake of Carême, who treated clear jelly as a structural material. The clarifying agent, isinglass, came from the swim bladders of sturgeon, much of it imported from Russia, and its cost was one reason calf's-foot jelly persisted in more modest households; commercial sheet and powdered gelatine gradually displaced both toward the end of the century. The maraschino is a period marker of its own: the dry cherry-kernel liqueur from Zara on the Dalmatian coast was a fashionable flavouring in English kitchens long before the word attached itself to a jar of dyed cocktail cherries.