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Grape Pudding
Soak 1/2 box gelatine in 1/2 cupful of cold water. Add 1 cupful boiling water, the juice of 1 lemon, 1 cupful sugar, and 1 pint grape juice. Place on ice; when it begins to jelly fold in the stiffly beaten yolks of 2 eggs. Pour into mould. When set and jellied turn out, and garnish with bunch of grapes.
A gelatine jelly of the Concord-grape era, straightforward in construction except for one step that cannot be reproduced safely today.
- Why it failsThe beaten egg yolks are folded into a cold, setting jelly and are never heated at any point. Raw yolk carries a Salmonella risk, and the mixture then sits for hours at a temperature that does nothing to reduce it. Use a current recipe for a grape gelatine or bavarian instead.
- "Stiffly beaten yolks"Yolks will not whip to a stiff foam; only whites will. Whether the original intended whites here cannot be determined from the page, and the line as printed does not describe an achievable result.
- Half a box of gelatineBoxes of granulated gelatine typically held four quarter-ounce packets, so half a box is roughly 1/2 oz, or about two modern envelopes — near the standard amount for setting a quart of liquid, which is close to what this recipe totals.
- Grape juiceThe juice is unspecified, but bottled unfermented Concord is the likely intention. Bottled grape juice today is generally sweeter, which is worth knowing before judging the full cupful of sugar.
- "Place on ice"This means the icebox or an ice-water bath, not the freezer. The instruction marks the point where the cook waits for the jelly to begin to thicken before anything is folded in.
- YieldAbout a quart of moulded jelly, serving six.
Gelatine puddings like this one belong to the decades after granulated gelatine reached American grocers in small boxes, which made a jelly that had once meant boiling calf's foot into an afternoon's work for a household with an icebox. The pairing with bottled grape juice is suggestive: unfermented Concord juice was promoted as a temperance drink in the late nineteenth century, and it also appears in desserts, sauces and moulded jellies of this kind.