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Orange Jelly
1/3 box vegetable gelatine 1 1/2 cups cold water 1 cup boiling water 1 cup sugar 2 cups orange juice Juice of 1 lemon Prepare the gelatine as directed and cook in the boiling water. Add the sugar, fruit juice and cold water to the cooked gelatine and strain through a cloth and strainer into cold wet molds, and put in a cool place to harden. Serve plain or with whipped cream.
"Vegetable gelatine" is agar-agar, the seaweed extract, and it behaves nothing like animal gelatin. Almost everything that can go wrong here comes down to how the agar is hydrated and when the fruit juice goes in.
- The hinge: agar must actually boilAgar does not dissolve in warm liquid the way gelatin does. It has to be soaked, then brought to a full rolling boil for a few minutes until no specks remain, or the jelly will set in patches or not at all.
- "1/3 box" is not usable as writtenBoxes of vegetable gelatine were sold in fixed trade sizes that no longer exist, so this quantity cannot be converted honestly. Work from the package instructions on whatever agar you buy; as a general benchmark, agar powder is used at roughly a teaspoon per cup of liquid for a firm set, and flakes at about three times that volume.
- Total liquidThe recipe carries about 4 1/2 cups of liquid in all (plus the juice of one lemon), most of it added cold after cooking. Calculate your agar against that full volume, not against the single cup of boiling water it is cooked in.
- Add the juice off the heatThe original is right to hold the orange and lemon juice back. Acid degrades agar's gelling strength when boiled with it, so the two cups of orange juice and the lemon go in after the agar is fully dissolved and off the fire.
- Setting and textureAgar gels as it cools below roughly 100F, well above refrigerator temperature, which is why the book says only "a cool place." The result is brittle and cleanly sliceable rather than wobbly, and it will not melt in the hand like a gelatin jelly.
- Wet the molds"Cold wet molds" is deliberate: a film of water lets the set jelly slip out without dipping the mold in hot water, which would be the usual gelatin trick. Rinse and do not dry.
- StrainingCloth over the strainer catches orange pulp and any undissolved agar. Do it while the mixture is still warm and pourable; once it drops near body temperature it begins to gel in the sieve.
- YieldAbout 4 1/2 cups, so roughly six servings in individual molds, or one 1 1/4-quart mold. Whipped cream is offered as an option, so the jelly itself is dairy-free.
Agar-agar reached Western kitchens from Japan, where the same extract of red seaweed is long established as kanten, and it became widely known in the West over the later nineteenth century, both as a laboratory culture medium and as a table jelly. Its appeal in a book like this one is straightforward: ordinary gelatin is boiled from calves' feet, hides and bones, which puts every moulded jelly, charlotte and aspic out of reach of a meatless household. Vegetable gelatine solved that, and vegetarian cookbooks of the period promoted it, sometimes sold in the branded boxes this recipe assumes the reader has in the cupboard. The orange jelly itself is the plainest possible demonstration piece: fruit juice, sugar, water, and a setting agent that came from the sea rather than the slaughterhouse.