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Port Wine Jelly
Put an ounce of best isinglass into a perfectly clean saucepan with half a pint of cold water, an inch of cinnamon, and a blade of mace. Stir over the fire till the isinglass is dissolved. Put with it an ounce of sugar and a pint of port. Strain through a jelly-bag, and put it in a cool place to set. This jelly is considered to be extremely nourishing for invalids. Time, one hour to prepare.
A three-ingredient wine jelly from the Victorian sickroom repertoire. The technique is straightforward; the difficulty is that its setting agent is no longer sold as food.
- Keep the port off the heatThe isinglass is dissolved in water alone, and the wine goes in afterwards. Heating port would drive off alcohol and dull the fruit. Stir the port in once the gelatine liquid is dissolved but still warm, then strain.
- IsinglassA pure collagen gelatine made from the dried swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, sold in leaves or shreds. It is now a fining agent for beer and wine rather than a kitchen ingredient. Leaf or powdered gelatine is the substitute, but the strengths are not equivalent — isinglass was generally reckoned weaker by weight than modern refined gelatine, so an ounce of powdered gelatine here would give a rubbery block. Work from the gelatine packet's own ratio for 1.5 pints of liquid.
- Imperial measuresThe pints are imperial: half a pint of water is 10 fl oz (285 ml), a pint of port is 20 fl oz (570 ml). An ounce of sugar is about 2 tablespoons — this is a barely sweetened jelly, which suits a ruby or tawny port.
- A blade of maceOne whole piece of the lacy aril that sheathes a nutmeg, not ground mace. A quarter teaspoon of ground mace is roughly equivalent, but it will cloud the jelly and defeat the straining.
- The jelly-bagA conical bag of flannel or close-woven cotton, hung and left to drip without squeezing. A double layer of dampened muslin in a sieve does the same job. Squeezing pushes sediment through and the jelly turns hazy.
- Setting"A cool place" meant a larder or cellar, several hours at perhaps 50-55F. A refrigerator sets it in three to four hours in a mould, longer in a deep bowl. The stated hour is preparation time only.
- YieldAbout 1.5 pints, or six small moulds.
Wine jellies belong to the branch of nineteenth-century cookery known as invalid cookery, a genre that occupies whole chapters in Cassell's and its rivals. The reasoning of the day held that gelatine was concentrated nourishment and that port was strengthening, so a jelly combining the two was thought to deliver both in a form a weak stomach could manage; the nutritional claim did not survive later analysis of gelatine as an incomplete protein, though the dish outlived the theory as a dessert. Isinglass gave it its clarity — the finest grades came from Russian sturgeon and were expensive enough that "best isinglass" was a meaningful instruction, with cheaper cod-derived sorts and, increasingly as commercial sheet gelatine came on sale from the mid-century, that competing beneath it. Port had long been the British fortified wine of choice, and the Methuen Treaty of 1703 is generally credited with consolidating and cheapening an already established trade with Portugal; by the time this book appeared it was firmly domestic: the bottle in the sideboard, drawn on for trifles, sauces, and the sickroom alike.