Home › The Principles of Cookery › VERMICELLI JELLY (Invalid Cookery)
VERMICELLI JELLY (Invalid Cookery)
This may be eaten cold as a jelly or hot as a soup. The ingredients required are, half a pound of neck of mutton all lean, the same of beef from the thick part of the leg, an ounce of isinglass, and an ounce of vermicelli. The meat must be cut very small, and put into three pints of water an hour beforehand. Bring to the boil, and then add the other ingredients, and simmer for from four to five hours. Season with a few peppercorns, and a sprig of any sweet herb, or a bay-leaf, except in serious illness, when only a pinch of salt should go in. Skim well in the early stages of the cooking, and carefully strain and free from fat at the end of the process. A little wine or brandy may be added after straining. If wanted cold, pour into shallow earthen-ware vessels, and keep in a cold place. It should simmer down to less than a quart.
A long-simmered meat broth stiffened with isinglass and thickened with pasta, written for feeding the sick. It works as a clear restorative broth, but two of its instructions need rethinking before you start.
- Add the vermicelli at the endFour to five hours of simmering will dissolve an ounce of vermicelli into cloudy starch, and the recipe then tells you to strain it out anyway. If you want the pasta as pasta, break it small and add it to the strained broth for the last few minutes; if you want it purely as body and gloss, follow the original.
- IsinglassIsinglass is collagen from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, once a standard setting agent and now sold mainly to brewers and conservators. Leaf gelatine is the usual stand-in, though the two do not correspond weight for weight, so treat an ounce as an upper limit rather than an equivalent; and a broth simmered four to five hours on neck of mutton and leg of beef may well set on its own without any help.
- The cutsNeck of mutton means the scrag or middle neck. "Beef from the thick part of the leg" most probably means the round or topside rather than shin; either way these are cheap boiling cuts chosen for the strength of the resulting stock rather than for eating. Half a pound of each is what the recipe asks for.
- The cold soakCutting the meat very small and standing it an hour in cold water before heating is not idleness. Cold extraction draws out soluble protein and colour, which is the whole point of a broth meant to be nourishing rather than merely tasty.
- Clarity and fatSkim persistently in the first twenty minutes, keep the pot at a bare tremble rather than a boil, and strain through a cloth. The simplest way to get it genuinely fat-free is to chill the strained broth and lift the set cap of fat off the top.
- Seasoning for the sickThe instruction to leave out peppercorns and herbs "in serious illness" reflects Victorian invalid doctrine, not modern dietetics. Season it as you would any broth unless someone has told you otherwise.
- Yield and settingThree pints reducing to "less than a quart" gives roughly two to three servings. Poured into shallow earthenware and chilled it sets to a savoury jelly; the shallow vessel is for fast cooling, which mattered more before refrigeration than it does now.
Cassell's, like many large English household dictionaries of its era, carried a substantial section on invalid cookery, and it sat closer to the sickroom than to the dining room. Before intravenous feeding and commercial nutritional supplements, concentrated meat broths, beef teas, essences and savoury jellies were what a household could offer someone who could not manage solid food, and the belief that the goodness of meat could be extracted into liquid was taken seriously by doctors as well as cooks. The savoury jelly form had a practical advantage: it kept longer in a cold larder than a liquid broth, could be taken cold by a feverish patient, and was easily melted down again as soup. Isinglass, imported chiefly from Russia and long used for both clarifying and setting, was the standard gelling agent in respectable kitchens until manufactured sheet gelatine gradually displaced it over the later nineteenth century. The tempering of seasoning in "serious illness" reflects a widespread nineteenth-century conviction that spice and stimulation taxed a weakened constitution.