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REFRESHING DRINK FOR THE SICK (Invalid Cookery)
Take two ounces of hartshorn shavings, and boil them in a quart of water; when the harts-horn shavings are quite dissolved, set the liquid aside to settle. Before it is cold strain it through a tamis upon half a lemon sliced thin, and sugar to taste. Cover, and let it remain till cold, then mix with it a good glassful of Moselle or French wine.
A gelatine-based barley-water cousin, thickened with deer antler and cut with wine. Everything about it can be reproduced with pantry gelatine, but the proportions and the wine deserve attention.
- Hartshorn shavingsShavings of hart (red deer) antler, boiled to extract gelatine. They are not sold for food now; two ounces of shavings in a quart of water would yield only a lightly set liquid. Powdered unflavoured gelatine is the obvious substitute, but any equivalence is approximate, since the gelatine yielded by shavings varied; something under half an ounce to the quart is the right order of magnitude.
- "Quite dissolved"Antler does not truly dissolve; the mineral matter remains and the instruction means simmered long enough that the shavings have given up their gelatine and gone soft, which older directions treat as a long boiling. With modern gelatine the step collapses to a minute of stirring off the heat.
- A tamisA drum sieve of tightly woven cloth or fine mesh. A fine sieve lined with a doubled square of muslin does the same job. Straining while still warm matters, as the recipe directs: as the liquid cools it thickens and passes only sluggishly.
- Setting aside to settleThe point is to leave the cloudy sediment behind, so pour or ladle off the clear liquid rather than tipping the pan. Strain before it is cold, as the recipe insists, or it will have begun to thicken in the pan.
- The wine"A good glassful" in this period means a wine glass, conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, added cold rather than cooked in. Moselle is a light, high-acid German white, typically though not only Riesling; any dry, low-alcohol white works. The wine is not decorative — it and the lemon are what make the drink palatable rather than merely gluey.
- Lemon and sugarHalf a lemon sliced thin, with the hot liquid strained over it and left covered as it cools, gives peel oil as well as juice. The recipe says only "sugar to taste"; sweeten modestly and taste again once cold, since sweetness reads lower cold.
- Yield and servingSomewhat less than a quart once the boiling has reduced it, plus the wine: enough for roughly four tumblers. Serve cold; it will be barely thickened, closer to a syrupy lemonade than a jelly. It does not keep — treat it as a one-day preparation and refrigerate.
- AlcoholThe wine is added raw and uncooked. This is a Victorian sickroom drink, not a modern one; it is unsuitable for children or anyone avoiding alcohol.
"Invalid cookery" was a fixed department of Victorian household manuals, sitting somewhere between the kitchen and the sickroom, and hartshorn jelly was one of its staples. Hartshorn — the antler of the hart, or male red deer — was rasped into shavings and sold by chemists and grocers as a source of gelatine, the same restorative principle credited to calf's-foot jelly and isinglass. Nourishing jellies and thin wine drinks were what the period offered a patient who could not eat, and the wine was regarded as medicinal rather than indulgent. By the time Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery appeared in the later nineteenth century, commercially refined gelatine was already displacing both hartshorn and calf's foot, and recipes like this one read as survivals from an older pharmacy. The name also attached to a quite different substance, spirit of hartshorn or ammonia, distilled from the same material and used as smelling salts — a reminder of how thoroughly one animal product had been worked into domestic medicine.""