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Grape Fruit Jelly
2 tablespoons granulated gelatine cup cold water 2 cups boiling water 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 cup grape fruit juice 14 cups sugar Soak gelatine in cold water; add boiling water, fruit juice, sugar, and strain. Mold, chill, and serve.
A plain wine-glass jelly built on gelatine and citrus juice, of the sort that filled the dessert chapter of American cookbooks before packaged flavored gelatin took over. Two of the quantities have lost their fractions in printing and need judgment.
- The missing fractions"cup cold water" was almost certainly ½ cup, and "14 cups sugar" is a broken 1¼ cups. Both are consistent with other jellies of the period; treat them as reconstructions rather than the printed text.
- Granulated gelatineThis is unflavored powdered gelatin, and 2 tablespoons is a little over two envelopes (roughly 17 g). That sets the three and a half cups or so of liquid firmly enough to unmold.
- Soaking mattersLet the gelatin stand in the cold water five minutes until it swells and looks granular-wet throughout before the boiling water goes in. Powder dropped into hot liquid seizes into lumps that never fully dissolve.
- Do not boil after the juiceThe boiling water dissolves the gelatin; the fruit juice and sugar go in off the heat. Prolonged boiling weakens gelatin's set, and citrus acid does the same.
- Grapefruit means bitterPeriod grapefruit was seedier and more bitter than today's Ruby Red or Star Ruby. With modern sweet fruit, 1¼ cups sugar reads as very sweet; taste the mixture before molding and pull the sugar back if you like.
- Strain, then moldStrain through a fine sieve or damp cheesecloth to catch pulp, membrane and undissolved gelatin. Grapefruit sacs float and will collect as a cloudy layer at the top of the mold.
- Chilling and unmoldingFour hours in the refrigerator, or overnight for a large mold. Rinse the mold in cold water first and it will release with a brief dip in warm water.
- YieldAbout four cups, enough for six small molds; a single 1-quart form will be brimful.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, and it padded its promotional chocolate recipes with a full complement of ordinary household ones — hence a grapefruit jelly with no chocolate in it at all. Molded gelatine desserts were a mark of a modern kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century: granulated gelatin sold in packets meant a cook no longer had to boil calves' feet or isinglass for hours to get a set, and the recipes that followed were mostly simple ratios of gelatin, water, sugar and whatever fruit was at hand. Grapefruit itself was still something of a novelty in northern American cities, arriving by rail from Florida groves that had only become commercially serious in the 1880s and 1890s, and it was eaten more as a bracing, faintly medicinal fruit than a sweet one — which may account for the heavy hand with the sugar here.