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Punch Jelly
Rub off the yellow part of two large fresh lemons with one or two lumps of sugar, then add more sugar to make up the weight to ten ounces. Put this into a bowl, pour over it the strained juice of three lemons and a Seville orange, and stand the bowl aside for a while. Put an ounce and a half of best isinglass into a very clean saucepan, with a pint of cold water. Stir over the fire till the mixture boils, then draw it to the side, and let it simmer gently for half an hour. At the end of twenty minutes, throw a lump of sugar and a tea-spoonful of vinegar into it, and add about a table-spoonful of cold water. Stir lightly, carefully remove the scum, and strain the liquor through a napkin. Put it into a clean saucepan, and add to it the contents of the bowl that was set aside, a quarter of a pint of brandy, and a quarter of a pint of rum. Let all simmer gently together for four minutes, then strain the liquor through a jelly-bag into the mould. If liked, calf's foot stock can be used, and then half the quantity only of isinglass will be required.
A spirit-heavy moulded jelly of the old school, built on isinglass rather than leaf or powdered gelatine. The conversions matter more here than the method, which is straightforward.
- Isinglass to gelatineIsinglass is dried sturgeon swim-bladder collagen; its setting strength varied a good deal with grade and preparation, so old quantities do not translate directly. As a modern starting point, powdered or leaf gelatine at roughly half an ounce (14 g, about two envelopes) per pint of finished liquid gives a jelly firm enough to unmould.
- Alcohol works against the setHalf a pint of brandy and rum in under two pints of total liquid is a high proportion, and alcohol interferes with gel formation. Err on the generous side with the gelatine, and expect a softer jelly than a plain lemon one.
- Don't boil the spirits away — or cook them inThe four-minute simmer after the brandy and rum go in is the hinge. Longer and you lose both the alcohol and the aromatics that make it punch; the mixture should be barely trembling, not bubbling.
- Rubbing sugar on the lemonsThis means dragging a sugar lump across the peel until it turns yellow and oily, extracting the zest oils. Loaf sugar has an abrasive face that granulated does not; finely grated zest rubbed into caster sugar gets you to the same place.
- Seville orangeThe bitter marmalade orange, in UK shops for a few weeks around January, sometimes into February. Out of season, substitute the juice of one small ordinary orange plus an extra squeeze of lemon to restore the sharpness.
- The vinegar and the scumThe sugar lump and teaspoonful of vinegar near the end of the isinglass simmer appear to be there to help clarify, bringing impurities up as scum that can be lifted off. Leaving them out will most likely mean a cloudier jelly.
- StrainingA "napkin" is a close-woven linen cloth; muslin or a double layer of cheesecloth does the same work. The jelly-bag straining at the end is what gives the finished mould its clarity, and the liquid should be allowed to drip rather than squeezed through.
- Setting and yieldReckon on somewhat under two pints of strained liquid once the isinglass has had its half-hour simmer — enough for a one-quart mould, serving six to eight. Give it several hours in the refrigerator, and longer than you would a plain jelly because of the alcohol; dip the mould briefly in warm water to turn out.
Punch jelly is the Victorian dinner table's way of serving a drink as a dish — the rum-and-brandy punch that would have gone round after dinner in the eighteenth century, set with isinglass and turned out of a mould. Isinglass, imported in sheets and shreds, was the standard clarifying and setting agent of the period, used for jellies and for fining beer and wine alike, and it was expensive enough that calf's-foot stock served as the thriftier alternative. Recipes of this kind belong to a moment when moulded jellies were a display item: clear, quivering, and often served in small glasses rather than sliced, so that the diner effectively drank the punch with a spoon. Powdered gelatine, commercially available from the later nineteenth century onward, gradually pushed isinglass out of the domestic kitchen entirely.