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Jellied Fish
1/2 pint (I cup) water Salt and pepper I heaping tablespoonful powdered gelatine 1 teaspoonful lemon juice 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley Skin and fillet the flounder. Season the fillets with salt and pepper, roll them up tightly, lay in a small fireproof dish, sprinkle the chopped parsley over them, add the lemon juice and the gelatine mixed with the water.
Bake for half an hour in a moderate oven.
Serve cold garnished with parsley.
Put the sago and water into a casserole, add the salt, and let it stand for two hours to soften; then boil it, stirring constantly, until it is thick, add the wine, sugar, strained lemon juice, ginger, and nutmeg. This is an excellent gruel for invalids.
The page as printed has run two separate invalid recipes together: a jellied flounder and a sago gruel. Treat everything from "Put the sago and water" onward as a different dish, and note that neither ingredient list survived intact.
- Missing ingredientsThe fish itself never appears in the list, nor do the sago, wine, sugar, ginger or nutmeg for the gruel. For the jelly, one small flounder, or two fillets of about 4 oz each, suits the cup of liquid given.
- Moderate oven350F. The dish is small and shallow, so half an hour is enough to set the fish through and dissolve the gelatine; longer will squeeze liquid out of the fillets and cloud the jelly.
- The gelatineA heaping tablespoon of powdered gelatine is roughly 10-12 g, or one and a half of the modern quarter-ounce envelopes, and will set one cup of liquid firmly enough to unmould. Soften it in a little of the cold water for five minutes before adding the rest, or it will stay granular.
- The hingeRoll the fillets tightly and pack them so they cannot unwind, then chill undisturbed for at least four hours in the refrigerator. "Serve cold" here means fully set; taken out warm the whole thing collapses into fishy broth.
- Fireproof dishGenerally an ovenproof earthenware or glass dish that can also go to table. A small ramekin or a 2-cup loaf pan does the same work.
- SeasoningFish jelly with nothing but salt, pepper and a teaspoon of lemon juice is very plain, in keeping with invalid cookery. If it is going to a well diner, a little of the fish poaching liquid or a strip of lemon peel in the gelatine water improves it considerably.
- The sago gruelSago is a starch pearl from palm pith, still sold in Asian and South Asian groceries; small pearls need soaking as directed and must be stirred, since they catch and scorch. The wine is unspecified; sherry or madeira would be a plausible period choice, a tablespoon or two in a cup of gruel.
- YieldOne invalid portion of jellied fish, one small bowl of gruel. Neither scales gracefully; the jelly in particular is best made in single servings.
Invalid cookery commonly had its own chapter in English household manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and jellied fish was one of its standards: white-fleshed, lightly seasoned, easy to swallow, and thought to be digestible in a way that fried or sauced fish was not. What makes this version modern for its date is the packet gelatine. Earlier invalid jellies were built on calf's foot or isinglass, both of which meant hours of boiling and skimming before you had anything to set with; commercially powdered gelatine, increasingly available from the 1890s, reduced the whole operation to a tablespoon stirred into water. The sago gruel spliced onto the end of the page belongs to the same tradition, sago and arrowroot being among the starches convalescents were commonly fed, often with a spoonful of wine as a restorative.