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Plums in Jelly
Soak two ounces of gelatine in a pint and a half of water for one hour; then add the juice of three lemons, one-half pound of loaf sugar, and the whites of five eggs beaten in a gill of water. Stir all together over the fire until boiling.
Then pass through a flannel jelly bag several times, until quite clear. Cut two dozen ripe plums into strips, take the kernels out of the stones, and mix both fruit and kernels in the jelly. Pour it into a wet mold, and set aside until firm.
When required to serve, turn out on a glass or silver dish. Serve with whipped cream and macaroons.
A Victorian clear lemon jelly with fruit suspended in it — except that the recipe deliberately adds the seed kernels from two dozen plums, which is why it cannot be recommended today. The notes below explain the problem and decode the archaic measures for readers working through the text.
- The plum kernels are the reason to stopPlum stones contain a kernel rich in amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed or chewed and acted on by enzymes. Kernel content varies widely between fruit and variety, but two dozen raw kernels stirred whole into a single mould is a real risk, and unlike commercial almond extract there is no processing step here to drive the cyanide off.
- Setting the jelly does not neutralise itThe jelly is brought only to a boil and then cooled; the kernels are stirred in afterwards, entirely uncooked. Nothing in the method degrades the glycoside. Use a current recipe for a moulded fruit jelly instead.
- Why the period liked kernelsPlum, peach and apricot kernels were used as a cheap substitute for bitter almond, giving the marzipan-and-cherry note found in ratafia and noyau. That flavour is the whole point of the instruction, and it is precisely the compound that makes them hazardous.
- Archaic measures in the textIn American measure a gill is half a cup and a pint and a half is three cups; in British imperial measure a gill is 5 fl oz and the pint 20 fl oz, so the liquid would be larger. "Loaf sugar" is simply hard refined sugar broken from a cone — ordinary granulated sugar is its descendant.
- Two ounces of gelatineNineteenth-century gelatine varied greatly in strength and refinement between makers, and two ounces for this volume of liquid looks enormous by current standards. Any modern rendering would need to be recalculated from the manufacturer's setting strength rather than matched by weight.
- The egg whites are a clarifier, not a setBeaten whites are stirred in cold and boiled so the coagulating protein traps cloudiness; the raft and the whites are then strained out through the flannel bag. They are not meant to remain in the finished jelly.
- The flannel jelly bagA doubled length of scalded flannel or several layers of damp muslin in a sieve does the same work. The instruction to pass it through "several times" is not fussiness — the first pass is always cloudy, and the bag must never be squeezed.
Clear moulded jellies were a display dish, and their prestige lay in transparency: gelatine had to be clarified with egg white and strained repeatedly until the mould could be read through, which is why so much of this short recipe is given over to filtering rather than flavouring. Fruit suspended in such a jelly, turned out onto glass or silver and ringed with whipped cream and macaroons, belongs to the same late-Victorian and Edwardian table as the ribbon jelly and the charlotte russe. The kernels are a period habit rather than an eccentricity of this book: plum, peach and apricot kernels as a household stand-in for bitter almond flavouring, a practice that later fell away, though the reasons usually offered — a growing awareness of the toxicity of cyanogenic glycosides, and the cheapness of commercial almond essence — are more plausible inference than documented fact.