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Wine Jelly
1 pint cold water. 1 box gelatin. 1 pint boiling water. 1 1/2 cups sugar. 1 egg white slightly beaten. 2 lemons. 1 stick cinnamon. 1 1/2 cups sherry wine. Make as lemon jelly; when cool add fruit and wine.
A cross-referenced recipe: Mrs. Wilson assumes you have already read her lemon jelly and only tells you what changes. Here is what the shorthand leaves out.
- A box of gelatinA box of granulated gelatin of this period generally held about an ounce, roughly the equivalent of four of today's 1/4-ounce envelopes. That is a generous amount for roughly 5 1/2 cups of liquid, but sherry and lemon juice both weaken a set.
- Soften first, then dissolveSprinkle the gelatin over the pint of cold water and let it stand until it swells and goes opaque, five to ten minutes, before the boiling water goes in. Gelatin dropped straight into hot liquid clumps and never fully dissolves.
- The egg white is a clarifierIt is not an ingredient in the finished jelly. Beaten white (and traditionally the crushed shell) is stirred into the hot liquid, which is then brought just to the boil so the coagulating white traps the cloudy particles, and the whole thing is strained. Everything solid is discarded.
- Strain and do not squeezePour through a jelly bag or a sieve lined with several layers of scalded muslin, and let it run through of its own weight. Pressing the bag forces sediment through and you lose the clarity the egg white was there to buy.
- Lemons and cinnamonTwo lemons give roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup juice; pare the zest in strips and steep it with the cinnamon stick in the hot liquid, then strain both out. Grated zest will cloud the jelly.
- Add the wine off the heat"When cool" matters. Sherry stirred into boiling liquid loses much of its aroma, and the alcohol here is never cooked off in any case, so treat this as an adult dessert.
- The unlisted fruitShe says to add fruit but never says which. Any firm cooked or canned fruit, or grapes and orange sections, will do. Avoid fresh pineapple, kiwi, papaya, mango or figs; their protease enzymes digest gelatin and the jelly will not set.
- Setting and yieldAbout 5 1/2 cups, which fills a 1 1/2-quart mold and serves eight to ten. Chill at least six hours, preferably overnight; dip the mold briefly in warm water to turn it out.
Wine jelly belonged to two traditions at once. As a clear molded dessert it was a showpiece of the late-Victorian table, prized for transparency, which is why the egg-white clarification and the unsqueezed jelly bag were treated as non-negotiable; and as a light, spirituous, easily swallowed dish it was a fixture of invalid cookery, recommended for convalescents in household manuals throughout the nineteenth century. What made it a weeknight possibility rather than a two-day project was boxed granulated gelatin, sold in premeasured ounces from the 1890s onward, which replaced the long business of boiling down calves' feet. Mrs. Wilson is most often identified with Philadelphia newspaper cookery columns, and her cookbook is full of these clipped cross-references to a master method given elsewhere, a habit carried over from newspaper work.