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Wine Lozenges
Steep one ounce of isinglass in water for twelve hours--use very little water for this purpose--then boil in a pint of port or Madeira until evaporated to one-half. Pour into a mould; when cold cut into lozenges with a large pair of scissors. These lozenges, used in moderation, are highly tonic.
A stiff wine jelly set with fish gelatin and cut into pastilles, of the sort Victorian households kept for invalids. It works, but the ingredient list needs translating and the medical claim does not.
- IsinglassIsinglass is collagen from the swim bladders of sturgeon and related fish, sold in leaves or shreds and long since displaced in kitchens by leaf and powdered gelatin. Use gelatin by weight, but treat 1 oz (28 g) as a starting point rather than a rule: good isinglass sets more strongly than modern gelatin, and this recipe wants a jelly firm enough to cut and hold its shape at room temperature.
- The soakThe twelve-hour steep in "very little water" is bloom, not dilution — the shreds need to swell before they will dissolve. Powdered gelatin blooms in five to ten minutes in a few tablespoons of cold liquid, so the overnight wait is not needed unless you have genuine isinglass.
- Reducing the wineA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, boiled down to 10. Reduce the wine first and add the bloomed gelatin off the heat: prolonged boiling weakens gelatin's set, and the original's instruction to boil the two together is the weak point in the method.
- AlcoholReducing by half drives off much but not all of the alcohol, and none of it is cooked out once the mixture is off the heat. These are not sweets for children, whatever their size.
- SweetnessThere is no sugar in the formula, so the result tastes of concentrated fortified wine and little else — bracing rather than confectionery. Other period wine-jelly recipes call for sugar and lemon; this one as printed does not.
- Moulding and cuttingPour to a depth of about a quarter inch in a shallow tray, chill until firm, then cut. Scissors work because a set gelatin sheet drags on a knife; oiling the blades helps.
- The tonic claim"Highly tonic" is nineteenth-century medical language, not a statement of fact. Port and gelatin have no restorative properties beyond calories.
- Yield and keepingThe reduced pint makes a large quantity of small lozenges, the exact count depending on the depth you pour and the size you cut. They stay pliable in a covered tin for a few days; left in air they dry and toughen.
Wine lozenges belong to the large Victorian category of invalid cookery, where wine, jelly and beef tea were prescribed as nourishment for the convalescent and the delicate. Isinglass was the standard setting agent of the period, imported in quantity from Russian sturgeon fisheries and prized because it produced a clear, almost odourless jelly where bone gelatin could taste of the kitchen; it was also used to fine wine and beer, which is why a wine merchant and a cook might buy the same commodity. Port and Madeira were the conventional invalid wines in British households, generally regarded as strengthening in a way that lighter wines were not — a belief with no clinical basis, but one that put a decanter of port in a great many sickrooms.