Strawberries
Nothing can surpass the method of eating strawberries with cream. The combination is not only delicious in itself, but carries with it the happiest remembrances of rural life and childish innocence. But cream is not always to be had, and some people are afraid of it. The Spaniards have another noble combinationmoistening the strawberries with the juice of a sweet orange. There are gastrologers who go further, and say that an addition of orange-peel (by grating the zest with a lump of sugar) is an immense improvement; and that it must have been in this fashion the fruit was served in the banquets of Mount Ida. "Physicians concur in placing strawberries in their small Sturgeon catalogue of pleasant remedies. They dissolve the tartareous incrustations of the teeth. They promote perspiration. Persons afflicted with the gout have found relief from using them; so have patients in cases of the stone; and Hoffman states that he has known consumptive people cured by them." - Abercrombie, quoted by Loudon. Strawberry Pudding. - Mash a quart of strawberries with sugar to taste-probably three-quarters of a pound. Melt an ounce and a half of gelatine in rather less than a tumblerful of hot water, which, when cold, is to be mixed with the strawberries. Put it into a mould, surround it with ice till it sets and gets as cold as may be. Turn it out, and serve it with cream.
The page is mostly an essay on how to eat strawberries, but it closes with a workable set-cream-less jelly. Two things need attention: the gelatine, which is wildly overstated by modern standards, and the sugar.
- The gelatine is the hingeAn ounce and a half of Victorian sheet gelatine is not the same thing as an ounce and a half of modern powdered gelatine, which is standardised and generally stronger. With today's product this quantity would very likely set too firm; figure roughly a third of it - about 0.5 to 0.6 oz, or 2 to 2 1/2 standard 7 g envelopes - for a quart of fruit plus the water.
- Bloom before dissolvingScatter the gelatine over cold water and let it swell for five minutes, then warm it gently until clear. Do not boil it, and let it cool to lukewarm before it meets the cold fruit or it will set in threads on contact.
- A tumblerfulIn an English kitchen of the 1870s a tumbler is about half a pint — 10 fl oz imperial, so around 1 1/4 US cups. "Rather less than" puts you near a cup.
- A quart of strawberriesMeasured as fruit rather than liquid, this is roughly 1 1/2 lb hulled berries, and rather more if read as an imperial quart. The recipe survives a good deal of imprecision here.
- Three-quarters of a pound of sugarThat is very sweet even for ripe supermarket fruit — the original assumes small, sharp, seasonal berries. Sweeten to taste and start at half that, tasting after the fruit has stood ten minutes and drawn its juice.
- Ice, or the refrigeratorPacking the mould in ice was the only reliable chill available. A refrigerator does the same work: four to six hours, or overnight.
- Turning outDip the mould in hot water for three or four seconds, no longer, loosen the edge with a fingertip and invert onto a wetted plate. A metal mould releases far more readily than glass or ceramic.
- The medical passageAbercrombie's claims about gout, the stone and cured consumptives are period folk medicine reported at second hand. Read them as history, not advice.
- YieldAbout six servings. Note that a quart of fruit plus the gelatine water comes to more than a quart of mixture, so allow a mould of at least 1 1/2 quarts. Cream is served alongside, as the opening paragraph insists.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was compiled by the journalist E. S. Dallas around the reputation of Auguste Kettner's Soho restaurant, and its entries characteristically run to essay before they run to method — a discourse on strawberries and cream, then almost as an afterthought a mould. The quoted passage comes from an Abercrombie often taken to be John Abercrombie the Scottish gardener, whose horticultural writing Loudon anthologised in his Encyclopaedia of Gardening, though the medical cast of the passage may point instead to his namesake the Scottish physician; the "Hoffman" invoked is generally taken to be Friedrich Hoffmann, the German physician whose therapeutic enthusiasms circulated in English garden books for a century after his death. The Spanish trick of dressing strawberries with orange juice is genuinely old and still current in Spain; the reference to the banquets of Mount Ida is a piece of classical decoration rather than evidence of anything. The pudding itself belongs squarely to its decade: commercially refined gelatine was by then widely available, and the moulded fruit jelly, chilled in a tub of ice, was the fashionable way for a household without an ice-cream freezer to put something cold and impressive on the table.