King Baggot
JELLIED
¼ box Knox gelatine 1/4 cup cold water 1/3 cup boiling water 3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup sherry wine 1/2 cup orange juice 3 tablespoons lemon juice Make same as other jellies and cover bottom of shallow pan with one-half the mixture. When nearly firm, place over it, one inch apart, halves of English walnuts. Cover with remaining mixture. Chill and cut in squares. Serve with whipped cream, sweetened and flavored.
Sincerely yours,
The heading on this page has collided with the one above it — no beef, peppers or hash appear in the method. What is actually given is a two-layer wine jelly set with English walnuts, cut in squares and served with sweetened whipped cream.
- The gelatine"1/4 box" of Knox means one envelope of the four in a box, about 1 tablespoon or 7 g, which is rated to set 2 cups of liquid. The liquid here totals close to 3 cups, so one envelope gives a jelly too soft to cut cleanly; two envelopes will hold a square that stands up on a plate.
- "Make same as other jellies"Sprinkle the gelatine over the 1/4 cup cold water and let it swell five minutes, pour on the boiling water and stir until fully dissolved, then dissolve the sugar in it and add the sherry, orange and lemon juice off the heat. Boiling the juices or the wine after the gelatine is in weakens the set and dulls the flavour.
- Why two layersThe walnuts are placed on a half-set base so they stay suspended in the middle rather than floating to the top. "Nearly firm" means tacky to a fingertip but still yielding; if the first layer sets hard, the second will not bond to it and the squares will split along the seam.
- Pan and yieldThe recipe says only 'shallow pan'; a pan about 8 by 8 inches suits this quantity and would give roughly sixteen 2-inch squares. Rinse the pan with cold water rather than oiling it — oil leaves a cloudy film on a jelly meant to be clear.
- Chilling timeAllow at least four hours after the second layer, or overnight. The wine and the citrus acid slow the set compared with a plain jelly.
- The sherryThe alcohol is never heated, so it stays in the finished dish and the flavour is assertive. Use a medium or cream sherry; a very dry fino tastes thin against 3/4 cup of sugar.
- Cutting and servingDip the knife in hot water between cuts and lift the squares with a thin offset spatula. 'Flavored' whipped cream of the period often meant a little vanilla, or a spoonful of the same sherry.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries (1916) collected handwritten recipes solicited from stage and screen performers, which is why the page ends mid-courtesy with "Sincerely yours" — the compiler set the letters more or less as they arrived, headings and all, which also explains the stray roast beef hash title stranded above a walnut jelly. King Baggot was one of the first American film actors to be known to audiences by name, working for Carl Laemmle's IMP and then Universal in the years just before this book appeared. The dish itself belongs to the vogue for moulded and layered gelatines that followed the arrival of cheap granulated gelatine in the 1890s: where a cook had once boiled calves' feet for hours, an envelope of powder now made a clear wine jelly an afternoon's work, and setting nuts or fruit in visible suspension became a way of showing off that convenience.