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Coffee Jelly
One-half package of Larkin Gelatine One-half cup of cold water One and one-half pints of strong hot coffee Three-fourths cup of sugar Moisten Gelatine in cold water. Add sugar and hot coffee, stir until thoroughly dissolved, and strain into mold. Serve with whipped cream or a thin custard sauce.
A three-ingredient dessert that lives or dies on how much gelatine you use, and the original measure is by a package that no longer exists.
- The gelatine measure is genuinely uncertainWhat a Larkin package held is not recorded, and half a package cannot be converted with confidence. For guidance, one modern envelope (1/4 oz, about 2 1/4 teaspoons) sets 2 cups of liquid to a spoonable jelly; this recipe has 3 1/2 cups of liquid in total, so roughly 1 1/2 to 2 envelopes gives a soft set that will still unmold.
- Bloom, then dissolveLet the gelatine stand in the cold water until it swells and turns opaque, five to ten minutes, before the hot coffee goes in. Granules added straight to hot liquid clump and you will strain out the very thing that sets the dish.
- Do not boil the coffeeHot is enough to dissolve gelatine; sustained boiling weakens its setting power and drives off the aromatics that are the entire point. Brew strong, use it just off the boil.
- "Strong hot coffee" means strongThe sugar and the chilling both mute flavour, so brew at roughly double your drinking strength. Weak coffee produces a sweet brown jelly that tastes of nothing.
- Straining is not optionalIt catches undissolved granules and coffee sediment, both of which show badly in a clear jelly. A fine sieve or a rinsed cloth does it.
- Setting timeFour hours in the refrigerator for individual molds, six or more for a single large one. Dip the mold briefly in warm water and it will release.
- YieldAbout 3 1/2 cups, which serves six in small molds or four generously. The whipped cream is worth making; it offsets the coffee's bitterness in a way the custard sauce does more gently.
Coffee jelly was a familiar American dessert in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it owed its popularity to the arrival of reliable granulated gelatine, which turned a dish that once required hours of boiling calves' feet or isinglass into a matter of stirring powder into hot liquid. The branded ingredient here is suggestive: recipes calling for "Larkin Gelatine" point toward the Larkin Company of Buffalo, the soap manufacturer whose mail-order premium clubs put its own line of groceries and household goods into American kitchens, and whose cookery pamphlets existed to keep those products in use. The dessert never quite died out; a close relative, kōhī zerī, became and remains a fixture of Japanese coffee shops.