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Raspberry Whip (C powdered raspberry gelatine)
1 C powdered raspberry gelatine 2% C boiling water Place mixture in bowl. Put bowl in pan with cracked ice around it, and 1 t salt on the ice. When the gelatine begins to get hard, beat until stiff. Serve with whipped cream.
Mrs. Kruckman.
A gelatine whip is a matter of timing: everything depends on catching the mixture at the right stage of setting. The rest is arithmetic on the packet.
- The hinge: beat at the syrupy stage"When the gelatine begins to get hard" means the point where the mixture has thickened to the consistency of raw egg white and mounds slightly off a spoon. Beat before that and it stays liquid; beat after and it breaks into rubbery lumps that will not fluff.
- Powdered raspberry gelatineThis is sweetened, flavoured dessert gelatine of the kind sold in small boxes, not plain unflavoured gelatine. A cup of the powder is roughly two 3-ounce boxes; plain gelatine substituted straight across would give an unsweetened, unflavoured result.
- The water quantityThe printed amount appears as "2% C", most likely 2 1/2 cups boiling water. If in doubt, follow the ratio on the packet you are using -- generally 1 cup boiling water per 3-ounce box; no cold water is called for here.
- Salt on the iceSalt scattered over cracked ice drops the bath well below freezing point, so the mixture thickens in minutes rather than hours. Refresh the ice as it melts and keep the bowl's base in contact with it.
- Use the refrigerator if you preferChilling the bowl in the refrigerator for 45 to 60 minutes reaches the same syrupy stage with less watching. The ice bath is faster but goes past the point in a hurry.
- Bowl sizeBeating roughly doubles the volume, sometimes more. Start in a bowl several times the depth of the liquid, and use a stand mixer or electric beaters -- by hand this is several minutes of hard work.
- Setting and servingSpoon the whip into glasses and return to the refrigerator for an hour to firm. The yield is not stated; from about two boxes of gelatine it would fill several glasses. Unsweetened whipped cream is the better partner, since the base is already sweet.
Church and society cookbooks of the early twentieth century are full of these whips, snows and sponges, and they belong to the period in which packaged flavoured gelatine was becoming a staple of the American pantry. Commercial gelatine powders removed the long, tedious business of clarifying calf's-foot stock or measuring sheet gelatine, and the flavoured, pre-sweetened versions turned a dessert once associated with skilled kitchens into something a home cook could assemble between other tasks. The beaten variation -- whipping the half-set jelly to double its bulk or more -- appears in manufacturers' recipe pamphlets of the period, and the extra volume it gives would suit any large gathering. Salt on cracked ice was in any case the familiar domestic way of getting below freezing point without mechanical refrigeration, as in hand-cranked ice-cream making.