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Gelatine Paste for Ornamenting Ices
Make clear jelly in the usual manner, then reduce it by slow boiling to little more than half, color it as desired, filter again, flavor, and cool it on large platters. Stamp out leaves, fern leaves, flower shapes, etc, and have them ready to place on the molded ices as soon as they are turned out. There are few terms of more uncertain meaning than the word sherbet. At first perhaps a simple beverage of sweet fruit juice mixed with water and cooled with a handful of mountain snow, it has come to stand for anything from flavored sugar and water and lemonade to frozen champagne punch.
This is a decorating component rather than a dish: a stiff, clear gelatine sheet that is cut into leaves and flowers and pressed onto turned-out ices. Two things govern success — the jelly must set hard enough to hold a stamped edge, and the sheet must be thin and cold.
- "Clear jelly in the usual manner"In this period that meant a gelatine or calf's-foot stock, sweetened, acidulated with lemon, and clarified with beaten egg white and shell, then strained through a jelly bag. Modern equivalent: dissolve powdered or leaf gelatine in hot sugar syrup and, if you want true clarity, strain through a coffee filter or fine cloth. Commercial gelatine is already clear enough that the egg-white raft is usually unnecessary.
- Skip the long reductionThe instruction to boil the jelly down to "little more than half" was presumably a way of concentrating a comparatively dilute jelly stock, though the recipe does not say so. Prolonged boiling breaks gelatine down and weakens the set. With modern gelatine, simply build the strength you want at the outset — roughly double to triple the gelatine you would use for an eating jelly, in the region of 4 to 5 percent by weight of liquid, which gives a rubbery sheet that cuts cleanly.
- Thickness on the plattersPour to about 1/8 inch, no more. Thicker sheets tear when lifted and sit up awkwardly on the ice; thinner ones dry out and curl. Oil the platters very lightly, or use a flexible silicone sheet, so the set jelly releases in one piece.
- Colour and flavourAdd colour before the final straining, as written, so any undissolved specks are caught. Flavour after the heat is off — extracts and spirits are volatile. Acidic juices and alcohol both soften a gelatine set, so compensate with extra gelatine rather than more boiling.
- Stamping the shapesAspic or truffle cutters are the right tool; a sharp paring knife works for fern fronds. Chill the sheet thoroughly first, cut on the cold platter, and lift each piece with a small offset palette knife. Keep the cut shapes on a chilled tray under plastic until the moment they are needed.
- "As soon as they are turned out"This is the hinge of the whole procedure. A freshly unmoulded ice has a momentarily damp surface that the gelatine will cling to; leave it and the shapes are liable to slide off or to freeze on crooked. Have the decorations laid out and the design decided before the mould is turned out.
- YieldNo quantity is given. A pint of jelly poured at 1/8 inch covers roughly 230 square inches, about three dinner plates' worth of surface, which is ample decoration for several moulded bombes.
- The stray paragraphThe lines about sherbet at the end belong to a different entry in the book and have nothing to do with the gelatine paste; the two have run together at some point in printing or transcription.
Ornamental gelatine belongs to the era of the grand ice display, when a moulded bombe or pyramid was expected to arrive at table looking like architecture rather than dessert. Professional confectioners kept a repertoire of cold-work garnishes — spun sugar, pastillage, chopped aspic, and cut gelatine like this — and the same aspic cutters used for savoury chaud-froid work on cold poultry served for flower and leaf shapes on ices. As for the digression on sherbet: the word is generally traced into English from the Turkish şerbet, itself from Persian sharbat and ultimately Arabic sharba(t), a drink, from the root shariba, to drink; and the writer's complaint that it had come to mean anything from lemonade to frozen champagne punch was fair for the period — the term was, on the author's own account, an uncertain one.