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Sauterne Jelly
½ cup lemon juice 1½ cups sauterne 1½ cups sugar green coloring Soak gelatine in cold water, add a small amount of coloring to boiling water, pour on to soaked gelatine, add sugar and fruit juice. Strain, if the liquid is satisfactory color; if not deep enough, add more coloring matter before straining. Mold, chill, and serve. 2 tablespoons gelatine cup cold water 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon wine
A wine jelly of the sort that filled the ornamental molds of the early 1900s. The printed ingredient list here has come apart in setting — it names sugar twice and gives no figure for the cold water or the boiling water — so read the notes below before you start.
- The garbled listTwo sugar quantities appear (1½ cups and 1 cup) and the water measures are missing entirely. Take the amounts from the instruction sentence: gelatine soaked in cold water, dissolved in boiling water, then sugar and fruit juice. A workable reading is 2 tablespoons granulated gelatine soaked in ½ cup cold water, dissolved in 1 cup boiling water, with 1½ cups sugar, ½ cup lemon juice and 1½ cups sauterne. The stray "1 tablespoon wine" is unaccounted for and can be ignored.
- Gelatine strengthTwo tablespoons of loose granulated gelatine is roughly two ¼-oz envelopes, about 14 g by the usual reckoning, though loose spoon measures vary; that will set about 3½ cups of liquid firmly enough to unmold. If you want a spoonable jelly rather than a standing one, use one and a half envelopes.
- Add the wine off the heatThe hinge of the recipe. Sugar and both liquids go in after the gelatine has dissolved in the boiling water, and nothing is reheated. Boiling the sauterne drives off the aroma the dessert exists for, and prolonged high heat weakens gelatine.
- What "sauterne" meantSpelled without the final s, this is most likely the American generic white wine of the period rather than the sweet Bordeaux Sauternes, though the spelling was also used loosely for the French wine. A modestly sweet white — a demi-sec Chenin or a Riesling Kabinett — sits closest. A true Sauternes will work but the 1½ cups of sugar becomes excessive; cut it to a cup.
- Acid and setHalf a cup of lemon juice in three and a half cups of liquid is a lot of acid, and acid softens gelatine. Do not reduce the gelatine on the assumption that the recipe is generous, and give it a long chill.
- The green coloringColoring is added to the boiling water, before the wine goes in, and the mixture is strained after the color is adjusted. Leave it out and the jelly is a pale straw color.
- MoldingRinse the mold in cold water and do not oil it. Chill at least four hours, better overnight. To turn out, dip the mold to the rim in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a wetted plate so the jelly can be slid into position.
- YieldAbout 3½ cups, serving six to eight in a single quart mold or in individual cups. The book gives no figure.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and it mixes house advertising with a full general cookbook — hence a wine jelly sitting in the dessert chapter of a chocolate book. Gelatine desserts of this kind were a mark of an ambitious table in the decades after packaged granulated gelatine became widely available in the 1890s, since they no longer required boiling down calves' feet and so moved from the professional kitchen to the domestic one. Wine jellies specifically were also served to invalids, where a little sherry or sauterne in a clear jelly counted as nourishment. The instruction to tint the jelly and then judge the depth of color before straining says a good deal about the period's taste: the point of a molded jelly was as much its appearance on the sideboard as its flavor, and the wine name on the menu card did the rest of the work.