Stock Jelly
To one and a half gallons of stock, put the whipped whites of eight eggs. Put in six blades of mace and the rind of three lemons, 4 1/2 pounds sugar. Let it boil ten minutes, then add three pints of Madeira wine, juice of eight lemons, a little vinegar or sharp cider. Let it boil only a few minutes. Strain through a dripper. If the stock is not very nice, it may require the whites of one dozen eggs to clear it.--Mrs. T.
This is a wine jelly built on calf's-foot stock, clarified with an egg-white raft. The recipe assumes you already have gallons of gelatinous stock standing in the larder and that you know how a jelly bag behaves; both assumptions need filling in.
- What "stock" means hereNot soup stock. In a jelly recipe of this period "stock" almost always means the long-boiled, strained, unsalted broth of calf's feet (or pig's trotters), chilled and skimmed of every trace of fat, whose only purpose is gelatin; this recipe assumes you have it already and does not say how it was made. Any fat left in it will refuse to clarify and will bloom greasy on the finished jelly. Powdered or leaf gelatin bloomed in water and sweetened wine reaches the same end without the clarifying step.
- ScaleA gallon and a half of stock plus three pints of wine and 4 1/2 lb of sugar yields something over two gallons of jelly — fifty or more moulded servings. A quarter of the recipe is a sensible household batch.
- The hinge: do not stir the raftOnce the whipped whites coagulate and rise, leave them alone. Stirring breaks the raft and drives the albumen back through the liquid as a permanent haze, and the whole point of the dish is transparency.
- StrainingA "dripper" is a jelly bag or a cone of doubled flannel hung over a bowl. Let it drip under its own weight and never squeeze or press it; pressure forces cloud through the cloth. Pouring the first cloudy runnings back through the bag a second time is normal practice.
- Mace and lemon rindSix blades of mace is roughly a teaspoon of broken blades, or about half a teaspoon of ground mace if that is what you have. Pare the rind thinly with no white pith, which turns bitter over a long boil.
- Why the wine goes in lateThree pints of Madeira added at the end and boiled "only a few minutes" keeps the aroma, and a short boil drives off less alcohol than a long one, though some is lost. Long boiling would leave a flat, cooked-wine flavour. The vinegar or sharp cider is there to lift the sweetness of nearly five pounds of sugar.
- SettingThe original gives no moulding instruction. Pour the strained jelly warm into rinsed moulds or glasses and chill several hours until firm. Test a spoonful on a cold saucer in the refrigerator before committing the batch; calf's-foot stock varies enormously in strength, and a jelly that will not set has to be re-boiled with more gelatin.
- Egg-white allowanceThe note about a dozen whites for poorer stock is honest bookkeeping: cloudier, less carefully skimmed stock simply needs more albumen. Whip the whites to a loose foam, not stiff peaks, and add them to stock that is cool or barely warm so they disperse before they cook.
Calf's-foot jelly was one of the standard preparations of nineteenth-century American housekeeping, valued in two directions at once: unsweetened and lightly flavoured it was invalid food, spooned to the sick as something nourishing that a weak stomach would accept, while sweetened and loaded with Madeira it became a supper-table showpiece, moulded, turned out, and served in glasses. Both versions depended on the same slow work — boiling feet for hours, chilling, skimming, and then clarifying with egg white — which is why the yield here is so large. The Madeira is characteristic of Virginia entertaining, the fortified wine having reached the Chesapeake in quantity through the eighteenth-century trade and remained the region's ceremonial wine long after fashion moved on elsewhere. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from many hands, and the attribution to "Mrs. T." is typical of the book's habit of crediting recipes to the households they came from.