Stock Jelly
Once making of stock jelly serves for 2 or 3 meals. For 6 quarts take: 6 1/2 quarts of water. 3 pounds of sugar. 8 ounces of gelatine. 10 lemons--juice of all, thin shaved rinds of 5. 1 or 2 ounces of whole spices--cloves, mace, cinnamon. 10 whites of eggs.
Put the water in a bright brass kettle, add all the other ingredients--the lemon juice squeezed in without the seeds, the yellow rind pared very thin, and the white of eggs beaten a little with some water mixed in first. The clean egg shells may be put in also to assist in the clarification. Use the sheet gelatine that floats, for preference. Then set the kettle on the side of the range and let it slowly come to a boil with occasional stirring. Let it boil about half an hour and above all, to avoid the trouble and waste of having to boil it again, be sure that the white foam of egg on top becomes thoroughly cooked so that it will go down and mix with the jelly again like so much meal. Sometimes to accomplish this it is necessary to set the kettle in the oven a few minutes to get heat enough on the top. Then run it through the flannel jelly bag suspended from a hook. The boiling having been properly attended to there should be not the slighest difficulty in getting it to run through not only clear but bright and transparent as glass. The first pouring coats the inside of the filtering bag with the congealed white of egg and every succeeding running through brightens the jelly.
The above makes jelly of good quality. It can be made cheaper with less sugar and lemons. It may be set down as a rule that jelly cannot be made this way without more or less lemon juice or some acid equivalent--it will not run through a filtering bag without.
A hotel-scale clarified gelatin base, meant to be stored and remelted with wine, fruit juice or flavourings as needed. Almost everything here still works; the vessel and the quantities are what need attention.
- Not brass, not copperA "bright brass kettle" was standard in a nineteenth-century bakeshop, but the juice of ten lemons is aggressively acidic and unlined brass or copper will leach into it. Use stainless steel.
- Scale it downSix quarts is a restaurant's worth. Divided by six for a single quart: about 1 quart plus 1/3 cup water, 8 oz sugar, 1 1/3 oz gelatine, the juice of 1 or 2 lemons and the thin rind of one, about 1/4 oz whole spice, and 2 egg whites.
- Gelatine strength8 oz to 6 quarts is roughly 40 g per litre, which sets very firm — this is a jelly for turning out of a mould, not a spoonable dessert. Modern sheet or powdered gelatine can be substituted by weight, but today's product is both more consistent and likely stronger than the sheet stock of the period, so test a small batch. The recipe prefers sheet gelatine that floats; it does not say what the floating indicated.
- The hinge: cook the raft throughThe egg-white foam must be heated enough to coagulate fully and fall back into the liquid "like so much meal." A half-cooked raft will not filter and the batch has to be boiled again. If the surface stays soft, the recipe's trick of setting the pot into the oven for a few minutes to drive heat down onto the top still works.
- StirringStir only while it is coming up to heat and the gelatine is dissolving. Once the whites begin to set into a raft, leave it alone; breaking it up drives fine particles back into suspension.
- The acid is structuralThe final line is the important one. Without lemon juice or an equivalent acid the liquid will not clear or pass the bag. Do not reduce the lemon in favour of extra sugar.
- The jelly bagA doubled flannel or a fine cloth in a colander, hung and left undisturbed. Do not squeeze it, and pass the jelly through two or three times — each run leaves a coat of coagulated white behind that filters the next.
- StorageCool quickly and refrigerate. Egg white and sugar syrup at room temperature is not a keeping medium; a week under refrigeration is reasonable, and it remelts gently over low heat.
"Stock" here means exactly what it means for a soup base: a neutral foundation made once, in bulk, and drawn on over several days. Jessup Whitehead wrote for the working hotel and restaurant kitchens of the late nineteenth-century American Midwest, where a pastry cook was expected to produce moulded jellies, fruit-studded aspics and wine jellies on demand, and keeping a clarified stock in the cooler was simple economy. The recipe also marks a technological moment: earlier cooks made clear jelly by boiling calf's feet for hours and skimming the fat, but commercially manufactured sheet gelatine had by this period made that labour unnecessary. What survived from the older method was the egg-white clarification, a technique in common use for both jellies and clear soups, and the flannel jelly bag, which is why the recipe reads more like a filtration procedure than a dessert.