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Raspberry Flummery
Soak an ounce of isinglass in cold water for an hour. Put a pound of raspberry jam, or, better still, a pound of fresh raspberries, into a preserving-pan with half a pint of white-wine vinegar. Stir the mixture constantly till it boils, let it simmer a few minutes, and rub it through a sieve. Boil the isinglass until it is dissolved, mix with it the raspberry pulp and as much sugar as will sweeten it sufficiently. Boil the mixture once more, and pass it through muslin into a mould which has been well soaked in cold water. Put it in a cold place, and when it is set turn it out carefully. If preferred, gelatine may be used instead of isinglass. Time, five minutes to boil the fruit with the vinegar.
A Victorian moulded fruit jelly, and the two things standing between you and a good one are the setting agent and the vinegar.
- Do not boil the gelatineThe instruction to "boil the mixture once more" comes from a recipe written around isinglass, which period cooks did routinely boil. Powdered or leaf gelatine loses setting power with prolonged boiling and can turn thin and slack, so bloom it in cold water and stir it into the hot purée off the heat until dissolved.
- Isinglass to gelatineIsinglass is dried fish swim bladder, once the standard clarifying and setting agent. An ounce of it was commonly reckoned to set about a quart of liquid; a modern 7 g sachet of gelatine sets roughly 2 cups, so two sachets or so is the ballpark for the quantity of liquid here. The exact equivalence is genuinely uncertain, so set a spoonful in a saucer in the refrigerator before you commit the whole batch to a mould.
- The vinegarHalf a pint of white-wine vinegar to a pound of fruit reads as a misprint to modern palates but is consistent with period sweet-sour jellies, which relied on sharp acidity balanced by heavy sugaring. Taste as you sweeten. If you want something closer to a modern raspberry jelly, a few tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice will do the acidulating work; strong acid also weakens a gelatine set, another reason to test.
- UnitsThis is a British book: half a pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. An ounce of isinglass is a weight, not a volume.
- Preserving-panRead this as a wide, heavy saucepan. Victorian preserving-pans were often copper or brass, and bare copper or brass is attacked by vinegar; use stainless steel or enamel.
- Sieving twiceThe sieve removes raspberry seeds, the muslin catches any undissolved setting agent and scum. Both steps matter for a clear jelly; skip the muslin and you get cloudy streaks at the base of the mould.
- The mouldSoaking or rinsing the mould in cold water helps release the set jelly. To turn out, dip the mould briefly in hot water and invert onto a wetted plate so the jelly can be slid into position.
- Timing and yieldAllow at least 4 to 6 hours in the refrigerator, or overnight for a large mould, rather than the vague "cold place." A pound of fruit made up this way serves about six.
Flummery began as something quite different: the word comes from the Welsh llymru, a soured oatmeal jelly strained from steeped husks and eaten with milk or cream. By the eighteenth century English cooks had transferred the name to any pale, set, quivering sweet, and by the time Cassell's was compiled it meant a moulded jelly or cream, the oats long forgotten. The isinglass here marks the recipe's age as clearly as anything in it — dried sturgeon bladder, largely imported from Russia, was the fine setting and clarifying agent of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before cheap commercial sheet and powdered gelatine displaced it, which is exactly why the book adds its closing concession that "gelatine may be used instead." The sharp vinegar note belongs to an older tradition too, in which fruit preserves and jellies were often balanced sour against a heavy hand with sugar rather than made simply sweet.