“All the shops are likewise open, with their varied goods—piles of brass lotas, and earthenware chatties, gay cheap cottons, fish of strange form and vivid colour, beside the familiar whiting, mullet, and soles. One which we soon learnt to appreciate is the seer-fish, which is rather like salmon, but with white flesh. Of course the vegetable stalls are attractive, but especially so the bewildering variety of tempting fruits, looking only too inviting as laid out in piles on cool, green banana leaves,—large luscious pine-apples, heaps of very bright-green ripe oranges, golden mangoes, custard apples, melons, fine gourds and splendid pumpkins, pumeloes (_i.e._ shaddocks), limes, guavas, bananas, papaws, lovi-lovis, durians, rambutans, bullocks’-hearts, sour-sops, sometimes even figs and grapes—why, these alone were an earnest of Paradise to one who had so recently escaped from a stormy winter in England! One fruit new to me, and very insinuating, was the rambutan. When ripe its rough skin changes from green to rich scarlet, and within lies a ball of cool, pleasant jelly, very refreshing. A hard uneatable kernel lies in the centre. Another very attractive little fruit, with most fragrant blossom, was the loquat, which belongs to the medlar family.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Make jelly of three tenches, three perches, and two carps, scale them, wash out the blood, and soak them in fair water three or four hours, leave no fat on them, then put them in a large pipkin with as much fair spring water as will cover them, or as many pints as pound of fish, put to it some ising-glass, and boil it close covered till two parts and a half be wasted; then take it off and strain it, let it cool, and being cold take off the fat on the top, pare the bottom, and put the jelly into three pipkins, put three quarts of white-wine to them, and a pound and a half of double refined sugar into each pipkin; then to make one red put a quarter of an ounce of whole cinamon, two races of ginger, two nutmegs, two or three cloves, and a little piece of turnsole dry'd, the dust rubbed out and steep'd in some claret-wine, put some of the wine into the jelly.
Sources: The passage is from C. F. (Constance Frederica) Gordon Cumming, Two happy years in Ceylon, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from May, The accomplisht cook of 1660, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — navy cloth, pudding stamp.