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Coffee Jelly
Cook fifteen minutes in double boiler, 3 cups coffee, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup Minute tapioca and a little salt. Flavor with vanilla.
— Mrs. Roscoe Blunt
A tapioca pudding in all but name, set with quick-cooking tapioca rather than gelatine. The whole recipe hinges on brewed strength and on chilling, neither of which the original mentions.
- "3 cups coffee"This means brewed coffee, not grounds. Brew it on the strong side; sugar and starch will blunt it.
- Minute tapiocaA pre-cooked, finely granulated tapioca sold under the Minute name from the 1890s and still on shelves as quick-cooking tapioca. It is not interchangeable with large pearl tapioca, which needs long soaking and will stay gritty in fifteen minutes.
- The double boilerNot optional decoration. Tapioca and sugar scorch readily over direct heat, and the gentle indirect heat keeps the starch from catching while it swells. Stir now and then; the mixture thickens noticeably in the last five minutes.
- Why it is called jellyIt sets on cooling, not in the pan. Expect it to look loose and soupy when you take it off the heat. Pour into a mould or individual cups and refrigerate at least three hours.
- Adding the vanillaStir it in off the heat, once the pan has stopped steaming hard. Vanilla extract loses its aroma quickly in a hot mixture.
- The salt"A little" is probably a pinch, an eighth of a teaspoon or so. In a coffee sweet it does real work against the bitterness.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart; four to six small cups. Coffee jellies of the period were often served with cream or sweetened whipped cream, though this recipe says nothing about it.
Coffee jelly belongs to a large family of turn-of-the-century "jellies" -- coffee, wine, lemon, orange -- that gave a cook something cold and elegant with almost no equipment. Those were usually set with gelatine; this one takes a shortcut with pre-cooked tapioca, sold under the Minute name from the 1890s and promoted to home cooks through the 1900s and 1910s, which thickened a dessert in a quarter of an hour instead of requiring soaked gelatine or hours of pearl tapioca. Church and club fundraising books are full of exactly this sort of recipe: branded convenience ingredients, four lines of instruction, and a contributor's name signed at the bottom. The Philathea classes were adult Bible study groups for young women. Contributors appear as "Mrs." followed by a husband's full name, the ordinary convention of the period.