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For Pink Lining
One gill of Sweet Jelly.
Two sheets of Gelatine.
Three tablespoonfuls of Cream.
One teaspoonful of Rum.
A few drops of Carmine.
This is a component rather than a finished sweet: an opaque pink cream-jelly used to coat the inside of a mould before the clear jelly and fruit go in. The proportions are all the original gives, so the method has to be reconstructed.
- A gillFive imperial fluid ounces, or about 140 ml — a generous half-cup. "Sweet jelly" here most likely means a sweetened dessert jelly already made up — a wine or lemon jelly — rather than a fruit preserve, though the book does not say.
- Sheets of gelatineVictorian leaf gelatine was not standardised; modern platinum-grade leaves run about 1.7 g each and set roughly 100 ml apiece. Two leaves to a gill of already-set jelly gives a stiff lining that will cling to a cold mould, which is the point.
- CarmineCochineal-based liquid colouring, still sold as carmine or E120. A few drops is literal — the lining should be shell pink, not fuchsia, and the cream already softens the tone.
- Order of workingSoak the leaves in cold water, warm the jelly just to dissolve them, then take it off the heat before stirring in cream, rum and colour. Boiling after the cream goes in will curdle it against the acid in a lemon or wine jelly.
- The hinge: temperatureThe mixture has to be cool enough to thicken on contact with the metal but still pourable. Stand the bowl over ice and stir until it coats the back of a spoon, then pour a little into a thoroughly chilled mould and rotate it until the sides are evenly filmed. Too warm and it slides to the bottom; too cool and it sets in streaks.
- RumA teaspoonful is for aroma, not strength.
- YieldProbably enough to line a mould of a pint or so, though the book gives no size. Any surplus can be set in a small dish rather than poured back into the warm jelly.
Lined moulds were a set piece of nineteenth-century confectionery, where a jelly was judged as much on appearance as flavour. A thin opaque coating of coloured cream jelly around the inside of a chilled mould gave a pink or white shell through which the clear jelly and any suspended fruit showed only faintly. The colouring is carmine, made from cochineal insects and the standard red of the professional kitchen long before coal-tar dyes were trusted in food; it appears in confectioners' and household books throughout the nineteenth century. That the book prints the lining as its own entry, with no method attached, tells you who it was written for a a cook already fluent in moulded work who needed the proportions and nothing else.