Orange
1/2 box gelatine 1/2 cup cold water 1 cup boiling water 1 pint orange juice 1 cup sugar 1 lemon Soak the gelatine in the cold water twenty minutes or until soft. Add the boiling water, sugar, orange and lemon juice. Strain. Keep on the ice until ready to serve. Cut the orange rinds in baskets and fill with the jelly broken irregularly just before serving.
A plain orange jelly, set firm enough to be broken into glittering fragments and heaped into hollowed orange shells. The proportions work out sensibly for modern granulated gelatine, but the vessel and the chilling need translating.
- Half a box of gelatineA box of granulated gelatine in recipes of this era is generally reckoned at about 1 ounce, so half a box is roughly 1/2 ounce, or two of today's 1/4-ounce envelopes (about 4 1/2 teaspoons). That is a firm set for the roughly 3 1/2 cups of liquid here, which suits a jelly that has to be chopped and mounded without slumping.
- Soaking is not optionalTwenty minutes in cold water lets each grain swell before it meets heat. Add gelatine straight to hot liquid and it clumps into strands that never dissolve, and no amount of straining recovers a clear jelly.
- Boiling water, then nothing hotterThe cup of boiling water is the only heat in the recipe and it is enough. Do not put the mixture back on the stove to hurry it; prolonged boiling weakens gelatine's setting power.
- Orange juiceA pint is 2 cups, and it wants to be fresh-squeezed and strained; bottled juice tastes flat against this much sugar. The lemon means the juice of one lemon, about 3 tablespoons, and it is what keeps the whole thing from cloying.
- StrainingStrain through a fine sieve or a doubled square of cheesecloth. Pulp and pith fragments cloud the jelly, which matters here because the appeal is entirely visual.
- "Keep on the ice"The refrigerator. Pour into a shallow pan or a bowl and give it at least 4 hours, better overnight, to set firm enough to break up cleanly with a fork.
- The basketsHalve the oranges, or cut a lid from the top, scoop out the flesh with a spoon, and leave a handle of rind across the top if you want the full effect. Do this before juicing so the shells stay intact, and fill only at the last minute or the rind weeps into the jelly.
- YieldAbout 3 1/2 cups of jelly, enough to fill six to eight orange shells.
Packaged granulated gelatine is what makes this recipe possible, and it was apparently still a fairly new convenience when flour millers, as this booklet seems to have been issued by, began putting out promotional cookbooks. In earlier practice a clear fruit jelly could mean boiling down calves' feet or isinglass and clarifying the result with egg white, a day's work that put such jellies largely in the hands of professional cooks and large households, though commercially prepared and packaged gelatines were on the market well before Knox in 1890. Once gelatine could be bought by the box in uniform strength, the moulded jelly became a standard American dessert, and the surviving prestige of the old craft went into presentation instead: jellies chopped to catch the light, layered in colors, or served in a hollowed fruit shell. Serving cold jelly in orange baskets is often said to have been a stock trick of turn-of-the-century domestic-science teaching, associated with the Boston Cooking School tradition and the corporate pamphlets that borrowed from it, which may be why it turns up here among other non-flour recipes.