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Moonshine
1 ounce of vegetable gelatine 1/4 pound of sugar 1 pint of boiling water 2 lemons Dissolve the gelatine in a little cold water, add the pint of boiling water and sugar, also the grated rinds of the lemons. Boil for a quarter of an hour, strain, and add the juice of two lemons; when nearly cold, whisk it till snow-white; put it into a mold to set until next day.
A whisked lemon jelly, set overnight and turned out. The only real difficulty is the setting agent: "vegetable gelatine" is agar, which behaves nothing like leaf or powdered gelatin.
- Vegetable gelatine means agarIn cookbooks of this period the term covers agar-agar, sold as Japanese isinglass or kanten, in flakes, shreds or bars pressed from seaweed. Powdered agar in a modern packet is a far more concentrated product than the loose shreds this recipe assumes.
- The quantity is the problemOne ounce (28 g) of modern agar powder to a pint of liquid would give a solid, rubbery block that could not be whisked. Current practice runs closer to 1 to 2 teaspoons of powder per pint for a spoonable set. The original weight is genuinely ambiguous because the product it names no longer exists in the same form; test a small batch before committing the whole quantity.
- Agar must actually boilUnlike gelatin, agar will not dissolve until the liquid is at or near boiling; soaking only swells it. The quarter-hour boil in the original is not carelessness -- it is what dissolves the seaweed extract. Keep it at a real boil and stir, or you will get gritty threads in the finished mold.
- Add the juice after boilingThe recipe is right to hold the lemon juice back. Prolonged boiling in acid weakens agar's set, so the rinds go in for flavour and the juice goes in off the heat.
- Whisking is a raceAgar begins to gel around 100-105F, far warmer than gelatin, so the window between "nearly cold" and "set solid" is short. Whisk hard the moment it thickens at the edges. Agar also foams less willingly than gelatin; expect a cloudy, aerated set rather than a true meringue-white one.
- Weights and measuresA quarter pound of sugar is a generous half cup. Two lemons give roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons of juice and 1 to 2 tablespoons of grated zest.
- Setting and yieldAgar sets at room temperature and does not need the overnight chill the original allows, though a night in the refrigerator does no harm. Rinse the mold with cold water rather than oiling it. Whisked, the mixture should roughly fill a 1-quart mold.
"Moonshine" was a stock name in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American dessert lists for a pale, whisked, snow-white cream or jelly -- the sense is the moon's glow, and the dessert has nothing to do with illicit whiskey, a quite separate use of the word recorded in English from the late eighteenth century. The interest here is the setting agent. Ordinary gelatin is rendered from animal bones, hide and connective tissue, which put every jelly, charlotte and blancmange out of reach of a vegetarian household; agar-agar, extracted from red seaweeds and long used in Japan as kanten, is generally said to have reached Western kitchens through the pharmacy and laboratory trade in the late 1800s, and was marketed to vegetarians as "vegetable gelatine" or "Japanese isinglass."