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Jellied Apricots
1 quart can apricots 3/4 cup sugar 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 1/2 cups water 1/3 box--1/4 ounce--vegetable gelatine Soak the vegetable gelatine in warm water for twenty minutes or more. Drain, and cook in cup of boiling water. Cook the sugar and the remainder of the water, letting it boil two minutes, then add to the apricots. Strain the cooked vegetable gelatine, and add to the fruit. Turn into molds wet with cold water, and let stand until ready to serve. Unmold, and serve with whipped cream.
A straightforward agar jelly from the era when vegetarian cooks needed a setting agent that did not come from calves' bones. The one thing to get right is the agar: it must actually boil, and it sets at room temperature, which changes how you handle it.
- Vegetable gelatine is agar-agarSold today as agar in strands, flakes or powder, from red seaweed. The original probably means the strand form; a quarter ounce is about 7 grams. Powder and flake equivalents vary by brand, so weigh it rather than measure by the spoon.
- "1/3 box" is not a usable measureIgnore it and weigh. The recipe gives the weight as 1/4 ounce, which is the figure to work from, since the size of the original box is unknown.
- Agar has to boil, and keep boilingUnlike gelatine, it will not dissolve in hot water alone. After soaking, simmer it in the cup of boiling water for at least five minutes, until no translucent threads remain, then strain. Undissolved agar means a jelly with gritty bits and a weak set.
- It sets at room temperatureAgar gels around 100F and stays firm well above that, so work quickly once combined and expect the mold to be set within an hour on the counter. No refrigeration is needed to set it, though chilling does no harm.
- The water is split unevenlyOne cup goes to cooking the agar, leaving half a cup to boil with the sugar, which makes a heavy syrup after two minutes at a boil.
- A quart can of apricotsAbout 4 cups of fruit in syrup, or two modern 15-ounce cans. Drain them or not as you like, but the canning syrup counts toward the total liquid and will loosen the jelly if you add all of it.
- Expect a firm, sliceable jellyA quarter ounce of agar in roughly six cups of liquid and fruit gives something closer to a Japanese kanten than a wobbly gelatine mold. It unmolds cleanly and holds its edges. Use less agar if you want it softer.
- YieldSix to eight servings from a single quart-and-a-half mold, or individual cups.
Vegetarian and "meatless" cookbooks of the early twentieth century had a practical problem with desserts: ordinary gelatine is rendered from animal bones, hides and connective tissue, which put every jellied dish off the table. Agar-agar, extracted from red algae and long used in Japan as kanten, solved it, and by the 1900s it was reaching American cooks under the descriptive name "vegetable gelatine", which is why the recipe measures by the fraction of a box before giving the honest weight. Agar was already familiar in laboratories as a culture medium for bacteria, a use generally traced to the 1880s. Canned apricots here signal the same period: fruit put up in tin was cheap, reliable and available in winter, and a molded fruit jelly with whipped cream made a company dessert for a household that did without meat.