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Jellied Peaches
6 peaches 1 cup sugar 3 cups boiling water 1/4 cup lemon juice 1/3 box--1/4 ounce--vegetable gelatine 3 dozen almonds Pare, and cut into halves six peaches. Heat two cups of water and the sugar to boiling, add the peaches, and cook until tender.
Remove, and place each half peach in a sherbet glass or mold. Prepare a jelly, using the peach juice--of which there should be one and one-half cups, adding water to make the required amount if deficient--the lemon juice, and one cup of water in which has been boiled the vegetable gelatine.
The gelatine should be previously soaked, thoroughly washed and drained. After the jelly has cooled, and begins to slightly thicken, pour slowly into the glasses or molds. When beginning to set, add to each glass two or three blanched almonds split in halves.
Serve with whipped cream.
A straightforward poached-peach jelly, but everything depends on understanding that "vegetable gelatine" is agar, which behaves nothing like the animal gelatine most cooks are used to.
- Agar must boilUnlike gelatine, agar will not dissolve by soaking or gentle warming. It has to be held at a full boil for several minutes until no threads or flecks remain, which is why the recipe boils it in its own cup of water before combining.
- It sets at room temperature, and fastAgar begins to gel somewhere around 90-105F, so the mixture thickens on the counter rather than in the refrigerator. Work quickly once it starts to cloud, and warm the mixture gently if it stiffens before the glasses are filled. There is no second chance to remelt it in the glass.
- The form of the agarA "box" of vegetable gelatine at this date would most likely have held pressed bars or loose strands of kanten, which would explain the instruction to soak, wash and drain. 1/4 ounce is about 7 grams, and at that dose in roughly three cups of liquid you get a firm, sliceable jelly rather than a wobbling one.
- StrainingEven washed strands leave grit and undissolved bits. Pour the hot jelly through a fine sieve before it cools, or the finish will be cloudy at the base of each glass.
- PeachesFreestone peaches at the edge of ripe hold their shape best. "Pare" means peel; a 30-second dip in boiling water and a plunge into cold slips the skins off cleanly, which matters because a knife-pared half looks faceted under clear jelly.
- The syrup measurementTwo cups of water and one cup of sugar reduce during poaching, and the recipe expects one and a half cups of juice afterward. Measure what you actually have and top up with water rather than assuming.
- AlmondsThree dozen for twelve peach halves is three almonds per glass, split into six halves. Blanch them yourself by pouring boiling water over and slipping the skins off; the bitterness lives in the skin.
- YieldSix peaches make twelve halves, and the recipe puts one half in each glass or mould, so twelve servings. Serve the same day, as agar weeps slightly on standing.
"Vegetable gelatine" is agar, extracted from red seaweeds and long known in Japan as kanten, where it was traditionally made by freezing and drying boiled seaweed jelly in the winter air. It came into Western use during the nineteenth century, both as a bacteriological medium and as a cook's ingredient, and it mattered enormously to vegetarian cookery: ordinary gelatine is rendered from animal bones and hides, which put every jelly, aspic and moulded cream out of reach for a meatless table. Books of this kind, aimed at households eating without meat, devoted whole sections to it precisely so that the elaborate moulded desserts of the period could still appear at the end of a meal. The almonds and whipped cream here are dessert convention of the period, dropped onto a distinctly modern chemistry.