Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pomona Jelly
Pomona Jelly
Take half a dozen good-sized and rather acid apples-Keswicks will answer excellently for the purpose. Pare, core, and slice them, and as they are done throw them into cold water to keep them from turning yellow. Drain them, and put them into a saucepan with six ounces of loaf sugar and a very small quantity of water to keep them from burning, and let them simmer gently until they are quite soft. Press them through a coarse sieve, and mix with them half an ounce of isinglass or gelatine which has been dissolved in less than half a pint of water. Rub three large lumps of sugar upon the rind of a fresh lemon till the yellow part is taken off; add these to the jelly. Stir the jelly over the fire until it is quite hot, put it into a mould, and set it in a cool place to stiffen; turn out before serving. Time to stiffen, twelve hours. Probable cost, 10d. if made with gelatine. Sufficient for a pint of jelly.
A clear apple jelly set in a mould, from the era when a turned-out jelly was the standard finish to a family dinner. The whole thing hangs on the setting agent, which behaves very differently now than it did in 1900.
- Gelatine strengthHalf an ounce (14 g) of isinglass or gelatine is what the recipe uses to set a pint. Modern powdered gelatine is more consistent, and probably stronger, than what a Victorian cook was working with; around 10-11 g for a pint should give a jelly that stands up but still trembles, and the full 14 g of a modern brand may set noticeably firmer than intended.
- Do not boil itThe instruction to stir "until it is quite hot" is deliberate. Gelatine loses setting power if held at a rolling boil, and boiled apple purée darkens. Bring it to steaming and no further.
- KeswicksThe Keswick Codlin is an early English cooking apple, sharp and quick to collapse. Bramley, Granny Smith or any firm tart apple works; six good-sized apples is roughly 2 lb / 900 g before peeling.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone. Six ounces (170 g) of ordinary granulated is the equivalent. The "three large lumps" rubbed on the lemon were lumps nipped from the loaf, irregular and often bigger than a modern sugar cube, which is the nearest substitute; rubbing them over the zest is an old and genuinely effective way of extracting lemon oil without pith or juice.
- The acidulated waterThe cold water -- The recipe drops the slices into plain cold water, which slows browning; a squeeze of lemon in the water works better. Drain well or you dilute the puree.
- SievingA coarse sieve gives a purée jelly, slightly opaque, not the crystal-clear jelly the name might suggest. Push it through with a wooden spoon or use the coarse plate of a food mill; a blender makes it foamy.
- Setting and turning outTwelve hours in a "cool place" means an unheated larder. A refrigerator sets it in four to five hours. Rinse the mould with cold water before filling, and dip it briefly in hot water to release.
- YieldOne pint, which would serve about four modestly. The recipe specifies only the quantity, not the number of servings.
The name is a piece of nineteenth-century kitchen classicism: Pomona was the Roman goddess of fruit trees and orchards, and her name is often said to have been attached by Victorian cooks to apple and fruit preparations to lend them a little dignity. This belongs to the moulded jellies that were a fixture of middle-class dining once commercial gelatine became cheap - the recipe's own note that it costs tenpence "if made with gelatine" is the point, since isinglass, made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, was substantially dearer and by the 1890s was being displaced in ordinary households. The trick of rubbing sugar lumps on a lemon rind is generally traced to older English cookery, and survives because it captures the volatile oil in the zest without any of the bitterness of the white pith.