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Fruit Jelly Salad
Make a clean lemon jelly with gelatin as wrappers on boxes of gelatin instruct, allow to partially cool and pour over any combination of fruits, as grated pineapple, sliced bananas, oranges, grapes or peaches. Pour into moulds and set in a cool place to harden. English walnuts, chopped, may be added if desired. Serve plain or with whipped cream.
A period gelatin salad that leaves the proportions to the gelatin package, which is still the sensible approach. Two details matter more than anything else in the text.
- Fresh pineapple will ruin itRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatin and leaves a soupy mould that never sets. Use canned crushed pineapple, or simmer fresh grated pineapple for a few minutes to destroy the enzyme before it goes in. The same applies to fresh kiwi, papaya, mango and figs.
- Gelatin quantityA standard envelope is about 2 1/2 teaspoons, a scant tablespoon, and sets roughly 2 cups of liquid to a soft jelly. For a moulded salad that must stand up when turned out, use the full envelope per 2 cups and count the fruit juices as part of the liquid.
- "Partially cool" is the timing that countsThe jelly should be cold and syrupy, about the thickness of raw egg white, before the fruit goes in. Add fruit to warm jelly and it all sinks; wait too long and the mixture sets in the bowl.
- "A cool place"Written for a cellar or icebox. Refrigerate 4 to 6 hours, or overnight for a large mould.
- Lemon jelly from scratchIf you are not using a flavoured mix: soften one envelope of gelatin in 1/4 cup cold water, dissolve it in 3/4 cup boiling water, then add 1/4 cup lemon juice, 1/2 to 2/3 cup sugar and enough cold water or fruit juice to make 2 cups total.
- Bananas and grapesSliced bananas brown even under jelly; slice them last and toss with a little of the lemon juice. Most grapes of the period were seeded and needed halving and pipping, though seedless varieties were already on the market; modern seedless grapes need only halving.
- UnmouldingRinse the mould with cold water before filling, and dip it briefly in warm water and loosen the edge with a knife tip to turn it out. Individual moulds or a loaf pan work as well as a ring.
- YieldTwo cups of jelly plus about 2 cups of prepared fruit and nuts fills a 1-quart mould and serves six as a salad course, on lettuce if you want it read as a salad rather than a dessert.
Fruit jellies like this one belong to the moment when gelatin stopped being a luxury. Until the late nineteenth century a cook wanting jelly boiled calves' feet or isinglass for hours and clarified the result; granulated gelatin sold in boxed envelopes turned the whole business into a matter of hot water and a wrapper full of directions, which is exactly what this recipe assumes when it tells you to read the box. The result was a flood of moulded "salads" in American cookbooks and promotional booklets of the 1900s and 1910s, dishes that sit uneasily between the salad course and dessert and are served, as here, either plain or under whipped cream. The English walnuts, often said to be so called to distinguish them from native black walnuts, and the grated pineapple were both signs of a well-stocked early-century pantry, the pineapple almost certainly canned.