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Corn Starch Jelly
This can be very nice when nicely made; if not made sour and harsh with too much lemon nor hard and opaque with too much starch. 1 quart of water and a half pint over. 12 ounces of sugar. 1 small lemon. 3 ounces of corn starch-3 heaping tablespoonfuls. Boil the water with the sugar in it and add to it the juice of the lemon and about half the rind shaved off thin and cut in small pieces. Mix the starch with the extra cup of water, stir it into the boiling syrup and let boil slowly for about 10 minutes to lose its milky appearance and become almost clear. Pour it into custard cups or any kind of molds. Serve in saucers with a spoonful or sweetened cream whipped to froth. This jelly looks better if colored either with burnt sugar or like the following kind.
A cornstarch-set molded pudding, the plainest kind of Victorian "jelly." The whole thing turns on the ratio of starch to liquid, and the original gives that ratio twice in ways that do not agree.
- The liquidA quart plus a half pint is 5 cups total: 4 cups boiled with the sugar, 1 cup held back to slake the starch. The "extra cup" mentioned later is that half pint.
- Sugar12 ounces is a bit under 1 3/4 cups granulated. That is sweet but not cloying for 5 cups of liquid; the lemon is doing the balancing.
- The starch measurement is contradictoryThree ounces of cornstarch is roughly 3/4 cup, or about 12 level tablespoons. Three heaping tablespoons is closer to an ounce. Three ounces gives a firm jelly that unmolds cleanly; an ounce gives something barely thicker than a sauce. Weigh it, and if in doubt start at 2 to 2 1/2 ounces (about 1/2 cup) for a mold that holds its shape without turning rubbery.
- Acid and setProlonged boiling with lemon juice hydrolyzes starch and slackens the set. If the jelly comes out looser than expected, add the juice off the heat at the end of the ten minutes and cook only the rind in the syrup.
- Slaking and stirringStir the starch into the cold cup of water until smooth before it meets the syrup, and whisk constantly as it comes back to the boil. Once thickened it scorches on the bottom of the pan quickly over direct heat.
- Why the ten minutesCornstarch tastes raw and looks milky until the granules are fully cooked. The visual cue in the recipe is the real test: pull it when it has gone from opaque white to nearly translucent.
- Strain the rindPour through a sieve into the molds unless you want shards of peel in the set jelly. Rinse the cups with cold water first and the jelly will slip out.
- Chilling and yieldAbout 5 cups of mixture, or 6 to 8 custard cups. Give it at least 3 to 4 hours in the refrigerator, and eat it within two days; cornstarch puddings weep as they sit.
- Burnt sugarThe suggested coloring is caramel: sugar cooked dark, then let down with a little hot water. A teaspoon or two tints the jelly amber and adds a faint bitterness that suits the lemon.
Cornstarch reached American kitchens as a commercial product in the middle of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks quickly put it to work as the poor relation of gelatin. Where a proper fruit jelly required isinglass or calf's-foot stock, or later boxed gelatin, a cornstarch "jelly" needed only water, sugar, a lemon and a few spoonfuls of starch, and it set in three or four hours without clarifying or straining through a flannel bag. The result is opaque rather than jewel-like, which is why the author suggests coloring it with burnt sugar. Jessup Whitehead wrote for hotel and restaurant cooks feeding many people cheaply, and his opening warning about sourness and opacity reads like the voice of someone who had eaten a great many bad ones: the dish has almost no margin, and its failures are entirely a matter of proportion.