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Milk Jelly
1/2 ounce of vegetable gelatine 1 pint of milk 1 ounce of sugar Lemon rind to flavor Soak the gelatine in a very little water all night, then add the boiling milk with the sugar and lemon rind. Let it simmer for five minutes, then strain into a mold; put it to set until next day.
A plain milk pudding set with agar rather than animal gelatine, which changes both the method and the texture. Two things in the original need attention: the amount of setting agent, and the fact that agar behaves nothing like gelatine.
- The hinge: agar must actually boil"Vegetable gelatine" in a book of this period means agar-agar, which does not dissolve in warm liquid the way gelatine does. It needs a genuine boil, held for several minutes, or you get gritty flecks suspended in loose milk. The five minutes of simmering here is not optional softening time, it is the dissolving step.
- Half an ounce is a great dealHalf an ounce is about 14 g of agar to a pint of milk. Modern practice uses roughly 1 to 2 teaspoons of agar powder, 2 to 5 g, per pint for a spoonable jelly. Follow the original quantity and you get something closer to a firm sliceable block that squeaks against the spoon.
- Powder, flakes or barPeriod "vegetable gelatine" was usually sold as a dried bar or as shreds, which are far bulkier and weaker by volume than today's powder. Measured by volume, powder goes much further than flakes or a piece of dried bar; weighed, the difference is smaller and depends on how refined the product is.
- The overnight soakSoaking suits bars and coarse shreds, which need to rehydrate before they will break down. Modern powder does not need a night in water; stirring it into the cold milk and then bringing it to the boil is enough.
- Lemon rind, not juiceThe recipe is careful to specify rind. Agar sets poorly in acid, and lemon juice added before boiling will weaken the gel noticeably. Pare the rind in strips so the strainer catches them.
- SettingAgar gels at around 90-105F, so it firms up as the mixture cools and needs no chilling to set. "Put it to set until next day" is generous; it will be solid within an hour or two, though the flavour is better cold. Unlike gelatine, it will not slump if the room is warm.
- YieldA pint fills a 1-pint mould and gives four small portions. To turn it out, dip the mould briefly in hot water and invert; agar releases cleanly and holds sharp mould detail better than gelatine.
Vegetarian and Lenten cookery had a standing problem with jellies: ordinary gelatine and isinglass came from calves' feet, bones, and fish air-bladders, which put every blancmange and moulded cream out of reach. Agar-agar, extracted from red seaweeds and long used in Japan as kanten, reached European and American kitchens over the course of the nineteenth century and was sold under trade names such as "vegetable gelatine" for this market, alongside Irish moss (carrageen) for cooks who preferred to boil down the weed themselves. A recipe like this is a sign of how much of the standard dessert repertoire depended on one animal ingredient, and how readily that repertoire could be reclaimed once a substitute existed. The result is not identical: agar gels are brittle and clean-breaking where gelatine is wobbly and melts on the tongue, which is why milk and sugar do so much of the work here.