Home › Puddings and Desserts › Whipped Jelly
Whipped Jelly
Make lemon jelly in the usual way. See directions above. Place it in a bowl on the ice, and when it is cool, but before it begins to harden, beat with a Dover beater until white and frothy. Turn into a mold and set in a cool place to harden; serve with boiled custard or with preserved cherries or other fruit.
A technique rather than a formula: it turns a plain lemon gelatin into an aerated snow. The whole thing hinges on catching the jelly at the right moment.
- The hinge: catch it at the syrup stageBeat when the jelly has thickened to the consistency of raw egg white and mounds slightly on the beater. Too warm and it stays liquid; once it has set it will break into lumps that never smooth out.
- Dover beaterA hand-cranked rotary egg beater, the standard American model from the 1870s onward. A hand mixer on medium-high does the same work in two to three minutes; a stand mixer with the whisk is faster still.
- "On the ice"Not the refrigerator, which did not exist in most kitchens. Set the bowl in a larger bowl of ice and water, and lift it out while beating so the jelly does not chill past the syrup stage in the middle.
- VolumeWhipping increases the bulk substantially, often to roughly double, so the mold should be larger than the quantity of jelly suggests.
- Gelatin strengthAerated jelly sets softer than plain, so a little extra gelatin in the base jelly may be needed for a clean unmolding.
- Boiled custardA stirred pouring custard of milk, egg yolks and sugar cooked in a double boiler, not a baked one. It is served cold and thin, as a sauce.
- Unmolding and holdingChill at least four hours. Dip the mold briefly in warm water and invert onto a cold plate; the foam collapses if it sits out, so serve straight from the refrigerator.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a guide, a quart of finished whipped jelly would serve roughly six to eight with the sauce or fruit alongside.
Whipped or "snow" jellies belong to the long run of moulded gelatin desserts that dominated American dessert tables between the 1880s and the 1930s, once granulated gelatin sold in packets made the old business of boiling calves' feet or dissolving sheet isinglass unnecessary. Aerating the jelly may well have been a way to get two dishes from one preparation, the same lemon jelly appearing clear one day and white and frothy the next, though that is inference rather than something the recipes say; it also stretched a small quantity to fill a large mold, which mattered when the mold itself was the point of the dish. The instruction to beat with a Dover beater dates the page as much as anything in it: the geared rotary beater was the ordinary American kitchen tool for the job, and cookbook writers of the period named it the way a modern writer names a stand mixer. Serving it with boiled custard or preserved cherries follows a common pattern of the era, in which a pale moulded sweet was often accompanied by a sauce for color and richness.