Home › Cold Desserts › Restorative Jelly
Restorative Jelly
1 ounce of barley 1 ounce of rice 1 ounce of sago 2 pints water 1/2 small lemon 1 tablespoon sugar Thoroughly wash the rice, sago, and barley, and put into a double saucepan with the water, also lemon rind cut thin. Let them simmer for three hours, then strain, and add the sugar. Serve cold.
A sick-room jelly rather than a dessert in the modern sense: three starches cooked to exhaustion in water, strained, and left to set softly on their own. Nothing in it is difficult, but the long, gentle cooking is the whole point.
- The ounces are weightsOne ounce each works out to roughly 2 level tablespoons of pearl barley, 2 tablespoons of rice, and 2 tablespoons of sago pearls. They are weights, not fluid measures.
- Two pints is ambiguousIf the book is American, 2 pints is 4 cups; if the measure is Imperial, it is 5 cups. Either works — the mixture is strained and the yield simply differs — but start with the larger amount if you want a thinner, more drinkable jelly.
- Double saucepan means double boilerA bowl or upper pan set over simmering water. Three hours of direct heat would scorch the starch and reduce the liquid past the point of straining; the water jacket holds the mixture just below a boil and needs no watching beyond topping up the lower pan.
- SagoPearls of palm-pith starch, still sold in Asian and South Asian groceries. Small pearl tapioca is the closest substitute and behaves much the same way here.
- Lemon rind onlyPare the zest thinly with a peeler and take no white pith, which turns bitter over three hours. The rind is strained out with the grains, so nothing sharp remains.
- Strain while hotPush the mixture through a fine sieve as soon as it comes off the heat — once it cools, the starch stiffens and will not pass. Pressing the solids gives a cloudier but richer jelly; letting it drip gives a clearer one.
- Add the sugar off the heatA single tablespoon in that much liquid is barely sweet by modern taste. Stir it into the hot strained liquid so it dissolves, then taste before chilling and adjust.
- What "jelly" means hereThere is no gelatin. The set comes from gelatinized starch and is soft and sliding, closer to a thick barley water than to a moulded jelly. Chill at least four hours in a bowl or cups; it will not unmould.
- YieldRoughly a pint of strained liquid, give or take, enough for two to three small glasses. Best used within a couple of days, covered and refrigerated; it thickens further as it stands.
"Restorative" is the giveaway: this belongs to invalid cookery, the branch of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household writing devoted to feeding the sick, the convalescent and the very young. Barley water, sago gruel, arrowroot and rice water were standard nourishments given when a patient could keep down little else, and their reputation rested on the belief — generally traced to classical and medieval humoral medicine, and long outliving it — that boiled cereal starch was gentle on the stomach. Long simmering in a double saucepan suited the purpose: it needed little attention and produced nothing that had to be chewed. Beef tea and meat jellies were the other half of the sick-room repertoire. It is a reminder that the line between a dessert and a medicine was once drawn in a different place.