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Cereal Coffee Jelly
1 pint water 1/3 cup dry cereal coffee 1/3 cup sugar 1/4 ounce vegetable gelatin A few grains salt Prepare the gelatin by soaking and draining according to directions in previous recipes. Simmer the coffee in the water twenty minutes. Strain. Add water to make one pint. When the gelatin is drained the third time, put it into the pint of coffee and cook till it dissolves. Strain. Add sugar and salt. Pour into individual cups wet with cold water. If desired, a stoned date and an English walnut meat may be dropped into each cup. When cold, remove from the cups and serve with whipped cream or plain cream.
A set, unmoulded dessert built on agar rather than animal gelatine, and on a roasted-grain coffee substitute rather than coffee. Both substitutions come from the health-reform kitchen this book belongs to, and both change how the recipe behaves.
- The hinge: agar must boil"Vegetable gelatin" is agar-agar, sold as strips, flakes or powder. Unlike gelatine it will not dissolve in warm liquid; it has to be brought to a full boil and held there a minute or two, which is what "cook till it dissolves" means here. Undissolved agar gives a grainy jelly that never fully sets.
- Soaking and drainingThe instruction to soak and drain three times refers to earlier recipes in the book; the recipe itself says "when the gelatin is drained the third time." It applies to whole agar strips, which are usually said to be rinsed to soften them and rid them of their marine smell. Powdered agar needs no soaking and can be stirred straight into the strained coffee; flakes are better given a short soak first.
- The quantity is ambiguousA quarter ounce is about 7 g. That is a reasonable weight of bulky soaked agar strips for a pint, but 7 g of modern agar powder in 2 cups of liquid would produce something closer to a firm block than a jelly. Powdered agar generally sets a pint at roughly 1 to 2 g; start low and test a spoonful on a cold saucer.
- It sets at room temperatureAgar gels at around 100F and will not melt again until roughly 185F, so this dessert holds its shape on a warm table where a gelatine jelly would slump. It also sets fast — pour into the moulds promptly after straining.
- Cereal coffeeA roasted grain and bran beverage, caffeine-free; Postum was the best-known brand of the period and similar roasted-barley or chicory drinks are still sold. Brewed coffee can stand in if abstinence is not the point, but it should be brewed separately to a pint rather than simmered twenty minutes as the grain beverage is here.
- Twenty minutes of simmeringGrain beverages are meant to be boiled, unlike coffee, so the long simmer is correct here — it extracts colour and body. Topping back up to a full pint after straining matters, since a good deal boils away.
- UnmouldingWetting the cups is the trick the recipe gives, and an agar jelly releases cleanly from a rinsed cup without any warm-water dip, since it does not soften at hand heat. A pint fills roughly four to six small cups depending on their size.
This comes out of the American health-reform kitchen of the turn of the twentieth century, where two ordinary ingredients were off the table: coffee, on account of its caffeine, and gelatine, because it is rendered from animal bone and hide. The answers were roasted-grain "cereal coffee" — Postum, launched in the 1890s in Battle Creek, is the famous example, though dozens of barley, bran and chicory imitators followed — and agar-agar, a seaweed extract long used in Japanese confectionery and sold in the West as vegetable gelatin or Japanese isinglass. Agar reached American cooks partly through the bacteriological laboratory, where it had become the standard culture medium precisely because it stays solid at blood heat. The date and walnut set into each cup are a characteristic touch of the same movement, which leaned hard on dried fruit and nuts for sweetness and substance.