Marbled Jelly
INGREDIENTS for quart shape. A quart of any clear sweet jelly, pistachio nuts, cochineal. AVERAGE CosT, 2s. 6d.
Wet a quart mould, coat it with the clear jelly and set a little near the fire, then divide the remainder into 4 basins. Into one put sufficient finely chopped pistachio nuts to make the jelly green; colour another red with the cochineal; leave two plain. When cool, beat one of the plain jellies to a white froth, then with a fork throw lumps of each jelly in turn into the mould, and when full, fill up with the clear melted jelly saved at first. The jelly, when turned out, should have a pretty marbled appearance.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A Victorian moulded jelly whose whole effect depends on temperature: every basin must be at the same thick, syrupy, nearly-set stage when you tumble it into the mould, or the colours bleed and you get a muddy stripe instead of marbling.
- The hinge: catch the setting pointChill each of the four portions until they mound on a spoon but still fall from a fork in soft lumps. Too warm and the colours run together; too cold and the pieces will not knit, and the finished jelly falls apart when turned out.
- Quart mouldAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.1 litres, so a 1.2-litre mould gives a little room. Serves six to eight, which the original never says.
- "Any clear sweet jelly"Most likely a gelatine jelly clarified with egg white; wine, lemon, or calf's-foot stock in the older manner. The recipe itself specifies nothing beyond "clear" and "sweet". A modern equivalent is a sweetened fruit juice or wine jelly set with sheet or powdered gelatine, made a touch firmer than a spoon jelly so it stands when unmoulded.
- Coating the mouldWet the mould with cold water, pour in a few spoonfuls of jelly, and rotate it while it chills to leave a thin clear lining. Setting it "near the fire" is exactly wrong for modern purposes — the Victorian instruction is to keep the reserved jelly liquid, not to set the lining. Chill the lining in the refrigerator and keep the reserve warm in a bowl of hot water.
- Pistachios will not colour it greenFinely chopped nuts suspended in jelly read as flecked pale green at best. If you want a clear green, use a drop of colouring and treat the pistachios as texture.
- CochinealSold now as carmine or carminic acid, made from the dried scale insect Dactylopius coccus. It is still a legal food colour, but it is not vegetarian and is a recognised, if rare, allergen; a plant-based red works identically here.
- The frothed jellyWhisk one plain portion over a bowl of iced water until it turns opaque and white. It sets faster than the others once aerated, so beat it last and use it immediately.
- Turning outDip the mould in hot water for three or four seconds only, no more, then invert onto a wetted plate so you can slide the jelly into position.
Moulded jelly was a display piece in the Victorian dining room, and marbled or "mosaic" versions were the show-off end of it: proof that a household had ice, patience, and a cook who understood setting points. The clear jelly itself was hard-won — before commercial gelatine was cheap it came from calf's feet boiled down for hours, or from isinglass made of sturgeon swim bladders, then clarified with egg white and strained through a jelly bag. Cochineal, imported from Mexico and later the Canaries and made from dried scale insects, was the standard kitchen red of the period and appears throughout Beeton wherever pink is wanted. Pistachios did the same duty for green, being both flavour and pigment in one; the pairing of red and green with clear and white in a single mould is generally regarded as a nineteenth-century convention, and one that seems to have extended to other moulded sweets of the period.