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Mint Jelly
1/2 cup lemon juice 2/3 cup sugar 2 1/2 cups water 2 tablespoons mint 1/3 package vegetable gelatine--1/4 ounce Soak the mint in the lemon juice one hour, then strain, and add the sugar and one and one-half cups cold water. Soak the vegetable gelatine in warm water twenty minutes or more. Strain and add one cup of boiling water; boil five to ten minutes. Strain and add the other ingredients. Turn into molds wet with cold water, and stand until ready to serve.
This is an agar-set mint jelly, built to serve where a meat-stock or calf's-foot jelly would ordinarily go. The whole thing hinges on treating the agar and the acid separately.
- Vegetable gelatine is agar-agarSold as agar flakes, bars or powder in health-food shops and East Asian groceries. A third of a package here is specified as 1/4 ounce, roughly 7 grams, which is the number to work from since package sizes have long since changed.
- Agar must actually boilUnlike animal gelatine, agar will not dissolve in warm liquid alone. The five to ten minutes at a rolling boil in the recipe is not optional, and skipping it gives a cloudy jelly with gritty undissolved threads.
- Acid goes in last, for a reasonAcid goes in last -- Lemon juice degrades agar if it is boiled with it, weakening the set. The recipe's order -- boil the agar in plain water, then add the sweetened lemon-mint liquid -- has the effect of protecting the set, whatever the reason for it, and should be kept.
- The mintTwo tablespoons most likely means fresh leaves, chopped or bruised, steeped cold in the lemon juice. Dried mint gives a dusty, hay-like flavour here; if it is all you have, use about two teaspoons and expect a duller result.
- It sets at room temperatureAgar gels at around 100F/38C and holds its shape in a warm room, which is why the original says simply to stand the molds until serving. Refrigeration is fine and faster, but not required.
- Texture is not gelatine'sAgar sets firm, clean-cutting and slightly brittle rather than wobbly, and it does not melt on the tongue. Reduce to about 5 grams if you want something softer, or add a little more water.
- ColourThe jelly comes out pale straw, not the green of commercial mint jelly, which is dyed.
- YieldAbout 3 cups of liquid, filling four to six small molds. As a condiment this serves eight or more.
Meatless cookery of the 1910s and 1920s, written largely for vegetarians, wartime households and hospital kitchens, leaned hard on agar-agar, a seaweed extract long used in Japanese confectionery (as kanten) and by then familiar to Western readers chiefly as a bacteriological culture medium. Suppliers sold it in packages simply labelled "vegetable gelatine," and cookbooks of the period reproduced molded jellies, aspics and creams with it.