Home › Cookery › Jelly Without Eggs or Boiling
Jelly Without Eggs or Boiling
Dissolve one package gelatine, an hour, in a pint of cold water. Then add three pints of boiling water, the strained juice of four lemons and the rind of two, one quart of wine, two pounds of sugar. Stir all well together until dissolved.--Mrs. E. B.
Jelly without Boiling.
To one of the shilling packages of Cox's gelatine, add one pint cold water. After letting it stand an hour, add one and a half pounds of loaf sugar, the juice of four lemons, one pint light wine, three pints boiling water, and cinnamon to the taste. In cold weather this is ready for use in four or five hours. Set the vessel with the jelly on ice, in summer.--Miss D. D.
Two versions of the same wine jelly, both trading on the convenience of packaged gelatine: no calf's foot to boil down, no egg white to clarify with. The main thing to settle before starting is how much gelatine you are actually using.
- What a "package" meantCox's shilling packet is generally reckoned at about an ounce of gelatine. A modern envelope is a quarter ounce, so one old package is roughly four envelopes, about three tablespoons of powder.
- The set will be softPeriod moulded jellies commonly used about an ounce of gelatine to a quart of liquid, while modern packet directions set two cups per quarter-ounce envelope. The first recipe carries about three quarts, and the quart of wine works against the set. Expect a spoonable jelly rather than one that will unmould cleanly; increase the gelatine if you want it to stand up in a shape.
- Bloom first, alwaysThe hour in cold water is not optional padding. Gelatine that has not swollen fully will string and leave gritty threads when the boiling water hits it.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone, equivalent to plain granulated white sugar. Two pounds is about four and a half cups; a pound and a half is roughly three and a third.
- Lemon rindPare the rind in strips with no white pith, steep it in the hot liquid, and strain it out before chilling. Grated zest left in will cloud the jelly and make it bitter over a long set.
- The wineThe recipe does not say which wine; sherry, Madeira and light white wines were all used in jellies of this kind, and the second version specifies a light wine. A quart of wine in the first version is a substantial amount of alcohol, none of it cooked off, which is worth knowing before serving it at a family table.
- Setting timeThe four or five hours is for cold weather; the second recipe tells you to stand the vessel on ice in summer, and a batch this large will want longer than a small one. Chill in a wide shallow dish or in individual glasses rather than one deep mould.
- YieldThe first recipe makes about three quarts, enough for sixteen to twenty servings, which tells you it was meant for a party rather than a weeknight.
The title is the selling point: earlier wine jellies began with calf's feet simmered for hours, the liquor skimmed, cleared with beaten egg white and shell, then boiled and strained through a jelly bag. Commercial gelatine, sold in Britain and America through the nineteenth century by firms such as J. & G. Cox of Edinburgh, collapsed a two-day job into an hour of soaking, and cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s advertised the fact in their headings. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, which is why the same dish appears twice over two sets of initials with slightly different proportions -- the book preserves what each woman actually did rather than reconciling them. Wine jelly itself was a fixture of the Southern supper table and the sickroom alike, and its generous hand with wine was unremarkable at the time.