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Wine Jelly
1/3 box vegetable gelatine 1/2 cup cold water 1 1/2 cups sugar 2 cups boiling water 1 cup wine Juice of one lemon Cover the gelatine with the cold water, and let it stand about half an hour. Add the boiling water, sugar and lemon juice. Stir until the gelatine is dissolved, and add the wine. Strain through a cloth into molds wet with cold water, and set in cold place to harden. Serve plain or with whipped cream.
A wine jelly built on agar rather than animal gelatine, which is why it appears in a meatless cookbook. Agar behaves differently enough from gelatine that the method needs adjusting.
- Agar must actually boil"Vegetable gelatine" here is agar, sold as shreds, flakes or sheets. It does not dissolve by stirring into boiling water off the heat the way gelatine does; it needs one to two minutes at a full boil to hydrate and disperse. Soak it in the cold water, then bring it up with the boiling water in a saucepan over heat before adding sugar, lemon and wine.
- "1/3 box" is genuinely ambiguousAgar boxes of the period varied in weight and no standard applies. Work by effect instead: on the order of 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons agar powder, or about 2 tablespoons of flakes, should set the recipe's 3 1/2 cups of liquid to a sliceable jelly, though brands differ. Test a spoonful on a cold plate before molding.
- Add the wine last, off the heatThe instruction to stir in the wine after the gelatine has dissolved is deliberate. Boiling the wine drives off the aroma the dish exists for. Once the agar is fully dissolved, pull the pan from the heat before the wine goes in.
- It sets at room temperatureAgar gels at around 100F and holds its shape in a warm room, so the "cold place" is for convenience rather than necessity. It also sets fast, which is why the mixture is strained straight into the molds rather than left to cool in the pan.
- Texture is not gelatineExpect a clean, brittle, short set that breaks rather than wobbles, and no melting on the tongue. This is the character of agar jellies and cannot be coaxed into the yielding quality of a calf's-foot or packet-gelatine jelly.
- The winePeriod wine jellies commonly used sherry or madeira, and a fortified or sweet wine suits the dish; a dry table wine will read thin against a cup and a half of sugar.
- Sweetness1 1/2 cups sugar to about 3 1/2 cups liquid is very sweet by current taste. A cup is closer to modern expectation and should make little difference to the set.
- YieldA generous quart of jelly, or six to eight servings from a single mold or individual cups.
Wine jelly was one of the standard clear "shape" desserts of the nineteenth-century table, originally made by boiling down calf's feet for hours to extract the gelatine, and later by the commercial sheet and granulated gelatines that made it a weeknight possibility. Its presence in a meatless cookbook is the whole point of the recipe: ordinary gelatine is rendered from animal bones and hides, so a vegetarian household needed a substitute, and agar-agar, the seaweed extract sold in America as "vegetable gelatine," filled the gap. Agar had long been used as a setting agent in Japanese and Chinese cookery, and it was also taken up in the bacteriology laboratory, where it became a standard medium for culture plates from the 1880s. Cookbooks aimed at vegetarians, Seventh-day Adventists and other reform-minded cooks of the period did use such gelatine substitutes, often in otherwise conventional dessert recipes with the one ingredient swapped out.