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Fruit Jellies
Jellies that are very well flavored can be made with fresh fruit, raspberries, strawberries, apricots, or even rhubarb, using the proportions of one ounce of gelatine (in cold weather) to every pound of fruit puree. In hot weather use a little less gelatine. As the fruit generally gives a bad color, you must use cochineal for the red jellies and a little green coloring for gooseberry jellies. The gelatine is of course melted in the fruit puree and all turned into a mold. You can make your own green coloring in this way. Pick a pound of spinach, throwing away the stalks and midrib. Put it on in a pan with a little salt and keep the cover down. Let it boil for twelve minutes. Then put a fine sieve over a basin and pour the spinach water through it. Strain the spinach water once or twice through muslin; it will be a good color and will keep some time. Orange and lemon jellies are much more wholesome when made at home than those made from bought powders. To the juice of every six oranges you should add the juice of one lemon, and you will procure twice as much juice from the fruit if, just before you squeeze it, you let it soak in hot water for three or four minutes.
An outline rather than a formula: the author assumes you know how to make a fruit puree and how to turn out a mould. The two things worth attention are the gelatine ratio, which is set very high by modern taste, and the colourings.
- The gelatine ratio is heavyOne ounce of gelatine to one pound (about two cups) of puree gives a jelly firm enough to stand up unsupported on a plate and be sliced, which is what moulded work of this kind called for. For a jelly meant to be spooned rather than carved, use roughly half — about 14 g of powdered gelatine per 2 cups of liquid — which is closer to current practice.
- Sheet or powderGelatine in 1915 was sold both in sheets and as a granulated powder, and strengths varied. Modern powdered gelatine is more consistent — a 1/4 oz (7 g) envelope will set about 2 cups to a soft jelly. Weigh rather than count sheets, whose sizes vary by brand.
- "Melted in the fruit puree"Soften the gelatine in a little cold liquid first, then warm it gently until clear. Do not let the mixture boil — prolonged heat weakens the set, and boiling drives off the fresh fruit aroma the recipe is built around.
- Cold weather, hot weatherThe instruction to use less gelatine in hot weather runs counter to expectation, since warmth works against the set. Whatever the author's reasoning, with modern chilling the seasonal adjustment is unnecessary.
- CochinealStill sold as carmine or E120, made from the dried scale insect, and still the reason "natural red" is not vegan. Standard modern food colouring does the same job; either way, use it by the drop, as the point is to correct the muddy grey of cooked fruit rather than to tint the jelly bright.
- The spinach greenThe strained cooking water gives a pale, fugitive green rather than the deep colour of the classic pressed-and-heated spinach verte. It does not in fact "keep some time" by current standards — refrigerate it and use within two or three days, as it is an unacidified vegetable liquid.
- Sugar is not mentionedThe proportions assume a sweetened puree. Sweeten the fruit to taste before adding the gelatine, and sweeten a little beyond what tastes right warm, since cold dulls sugar and acid alike.
- RhubarbStalks only. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid at levels high enough to be poisonous and are never used in cooking.
- Yield and unmouldingA pound of puree fills a 2-cup mould and serves four. Chill at least four hours, dip the mould in warm water for a few seconds, and turn out onto a wetted plate so the jelly can be slid into position.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain during the First World War from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees, and sold in aid of their relief; the domestic, slightly wistful tone of entries like this one belongs to cooks describing the kitchens they had left. The recipe sits within a period in which moulded gelatine work had become a middle-class possibility: commercial sheet gelatine had displaced the long boiling of calves' feet over the nineteenth century, and by 1915 packet jelly powders — the "bought powders" the author dismisses as less wholesome ame spinach colouring is older still, a survival of the medieval and early modern practice of tinting food with vegetable and insect dyes: green from spinach or parsley, red from cochineal, which reached European kitchens from Mexico in the sixteenth century and remained the standard red until coal-tar dyes competed with it.