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RASPBERRY JELLY (another way)
Take half a pound of fresh, ripe-plucked raspberries, and put them in a basin. Add two table-spoonfuls of powdered sugar, crush the fruit, and pour it on a fine sieve held over a china bowl placed to receive the juice. Add to the raspberry-juice the juice of two oranges, and filter on a sieve or through a glass funnel, with blotting-paper torn up into little bits and well softened with water. "This method of filtering fruit," says M. Dubois, "is the best and simplest of all." Soak half an ounce of good gelatine, and dissolve this in water enough to three-parts fill a jelly-mould; add three-quarters of a pound of powdered sugar, and then clarify the mixture with the whites of two eggs and the juice of a few lemons. When the mixture becomes limpid, add the juice of the raspberries and pour it immediately into a jelly-mould embedded in pounded ice. Let it stand for three-quarters of an hour, and then turn the jelly out on a dish, having previously dipped the mould in warm water. Jelly made with the juice of red fruit, should not be allowed to remain long in a tin mould, contact with which injures its colour.
A cold-set fruit jelly built on gelatine and a clarified sugar syrup, in the French manner. Two things need attention before you start: the filtering method, and the fact that the water quantity is given only as "enough to three-parts fill a jelly-mould".
- Skip the blotting paperM. Dubois's blotting-paper filter belongs to a century when paper was unsized rag pulp. Modern blotting and filter papers may carry optical brighteners or sizing agents; use a coffee filter, a double layer of damp muslin, or a jelly bag instead. The purpose is the same: catch the raspberry pulp and seeds so the jelly sets clear.
- The ambiguous liquid quantity"Water enough to three-parts fill a jelly-mould" depends entirely on the mould. Half an ounce of gelatine (about 14 g, or two standard envelopes) will set roughly 500-600 ml / 1 pint of total liquid to a firm turn-out jelly, and that figure includes the fruit and citrus juice. Work backwards from the gelatine rather than from the mould.
- Powdered sugarIn Victorian usage this means granulated sugar ground fine — what is now sold as caster or superfine sugar. It is not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will cloud the jelly you have just gone to such trouble to filter.
- Three-quarters of a pound of sugarThat is 340 g in about a pint of liquid — a syrup by nineteenth-century standards, and startlingly sweet by ours. Half that amount still sets and clarifies perfectly well; the gelatine, not the sugar, does the structural work.
- Clarifying with egg whiteWhisk the whites into the cool sweetened gelatine liquid, then bring it up slowly, stirring, until the raft forms and the liquid beneath runs clear. Stop stirring once the raft rises, hold it just below a simmer for a few minutes, then ladle through a scalded cloth. A rolling boil breaks the raft and undoes the whole operation.
- Add the fruit juice off the heatThe raspberry and orange juice goes in after clarification, once the syrup has cooled to lukewarm. Boiling fresh raspberry juice dulls both the colour and the perfume, which are the only reasons to make this rather than a cooked preserve.
- Setting timeThree-quarters of an hour applies to a mould embedded in pounded ice, as the original directs. In a domestic refrigerator allow about 4 hours for a small mould and overnight for anything above a pint. Chill the mould before filling.
- The mouldThe warning about tin is sound and extends to bare aluminium and cast iron: acid fruit juice reacts with the metal and greys the colour. Use glass, ceramic, stainless steel or silicone. To turn out, dip briefly in warm water as the recipe directs — a few seconds only; longer and the outer surface melts to slush.
- YieldOn the gelatine-based estimate above, about a pint, enough for perhaps six as part of a cold table; the original leaves the volume entirely to the size of the mould.
The M. Dubois quoted here is Urbain Dubois, the French chef who cooked for Prussian and Russian aristocracy and who, with Émile Bernard, produced La Cuisine Classique — one of the most influential technical manuals of the mid-nineteenth century and a standing authority for the English compilers who assembled works like Cassell's. Citing him by name was a mark of seriousness. The recipe sits at the point where the moulded jelly was at its social peak. Gelatine had shifted within living memory from a laborious kitchen extraction of calves' feet to a reliable packaged product — and clarity was often said to be the point, a jelly being commonly judged by whether you could see through it.