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Lemon Jelly
To one cup of sugar add a pint of water and allow it to boil twenty minutes. Before making the syrup, put two tablespoons of granulated gelatine to soak in half a cup of cold water. Pour over it the boiling syrup, add half a cup of lemon juice and the grated rind of one lemon. Strain through fine cheesecloth into a wet mold and allow it to set.
A plain molded lemon jelly of the sort that closed a hundred late-Victorian dinners. The only real variable is the gelatine, which has changed in strength and packaging since this was written.
- The gelatineTwo tablespoons of granulated gelatine is six teaspoons, rather more than two modern 1/4-oz envelopes (which come to about 4 1/2 to 5 teaspoons between them), so measure rather than counting packets. Granulated gelatine of this period was not sold to a standardised strength as modern gelatine is, so results may have varied; at this quantity you should get a firm jelly that will stand up when unmolded rather than a spoonable one.
- Do not boil the gelatineThe hinge of the recipe. The syrup is boiled first and then poured over the soaked gelatine off the heat; prolonged boiling after the gelatine goes in weakens its setting power and can leave a jelly that never firms. Stir until fully dissolved and no grains remain on the spoon.
- Twenty minutes of boilingA pint of water with a cup of sugar boiled hard for twenty minutes will reduce noticeably, perhaps by as much as a third, which concentrates the syrup and helps account for the firm set. How far it reduces depends on the pan; in a wide one it will go faster, so watch the volume rather than the clock.
- LemonsHalf a cup of juice is three to four ordinary lemons, depending on size. Grate the rind before juicing, and take only the yellow zest; the white pith turns the jelly bitter.
- StrainingFine cheesecloth catches the zest, any undissolved gelatine and the scum from the syrup. Skip it and the jelly will be cloudy with flecks suspended through it. Do not press or wring the cloth, which pushes fine solids through.
- A wet moldRinse the mold in cold water and leave it wet rather than drying or oiling it. The film of water breaks the seal and lets the set jelly slip out; a brief dip of the mold in warm water at serving time finishes the job.
- Setting timeFour to six hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. The original gives no time at all; modern refrigeration is colder and more reliable than an icebox or a cold larder.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 cups of liquid, filling a 3-cup mold and serving four to six. The recipe gives no serving instruction beyond the mold.
Clear molded jellies were a display dish long before they were an easy one. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the gelatine came from calves' feet or isinglass, boiled down over hours and clarified with egg white and repeated straining through a jelly bag, which made a trembling transparent mold a genuine mark of a well-run kitchen. Commercially packaged granulated gelatine, which spread through American groceries in the last decades of the nineteenth century, collapsed that labor into a half-cup of cold water and a few minutes of soaking, and cookbooks of the period reflect the change: lemon, wine and orange jellies appear routinely in cold-dessert chapters, given in a few lines because there is genuinely little to say.