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Coffee Jelly Dessert
Follow directions as above for CERTO Jelly, but use double strength coffee in place of water, and add juice of 1 lemon. Serve with unsweetened whipped cream.
A variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it borrows the sugar, liquid and pectin proportions of the book's base CERTO Jelly and swaps the water for coffee. A few things need translating before it will set.
- Certo is liquid pectinCerto is a brand of liquid fruit pectin, still sold, though the packaging has changed: older recipes call for "half a bottle", while modern Certo comes in 3 fl oz pouches, so a pouch is in the right neighbourhood for the old half-bottle. Go by the base recipe's own measure rather than a cup conversion. Powdered pectin is not interchangeable, since it must be added to the liquid before the sugar rather than after boiling.
- The base proportions govern everythingThe set depends entirely on the ratios in the preceding CERTO Jelly recipe, which is not reproduced here -- follow its own measures. Do not reduce the sugar to suit modern taste: high-methoxyl pectin of this kind needs a very high sugar concentration to gel at all, and a lean version will stay syrup.
- Acid is the hingeThe juice of one lemon is not a flavouring afterthought. Coffee is only mildly acidic, and liquid pectin needs acid as well as sugar to form a network; without the lemon the mixture will not firm. Use fresh juice, about 2-3 tablespoons, and add it with the coffee rather than at the end.
- "Double strength coffee"Brew with twice the usual grounds for the same water, rather than boiling brewed coffee down; reducing brewed coffee concentrates its bitterness.
- It is a pectin jelly, not a gelatin oneExpect a firm jelly that holds a spoon and stays set at room temperature, quite unlike the trembling gelatin coffee jelly served in Japanese cafes or in Victorian moulds. Serve it spooned into small glasses or dishes.
- Filling and coolingPour hot into small heatproof glasses or a shallow dish, skim any foam, and leave undisturbed at room temperature until set, which can take several hours.
- Yield and servingThe yield depends on the quantities in the base recipe; expect enough for several small servings. The unsweetened whipped cream is doing real work here against a very sweet jelly.
Certo arrived when commercial fruit pectin was new: extracted from apple pomace and citrus peel, it let cooks set jelly in minutes rather than boiling juice down for an hour, and the little recipe booklets that came with the bottle were the manufacturer's way of persuading households that the shortcut was respectable. Pages like this one show the strategy at work, stretching a pectin product past its obvious use in fruit preserves into desserts, salads and novelties, so that a bottle bought in berry season had a reason to be used in January. Coffee jelly itself is older than Certo and is generally traced to New England, where it appears in nineteenth-century American cookbooks as a genteel gelatin dessert served with cream; the same dish took root in Japan as kohi zeri and remains common there. What is distinctly of this period is the substitution game the entry plays: keep the formula, change the liquid, and let the customer feel inventive.