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Coffee Jelly
1½ box gelatine or ½ cup cold water 2 tablespoons granulated gelatine 1 cup boiling water 1/3 cup sugar 2 cups boiled coffee Make same as Lemon Jelly. Serve with sugar and cream.
A three-cup gelatine dessert built on the standard method given under Lemon Jelly: soften the gelatine in cold water, dissolve it in boiling water, add sugar and coffee, strain, and chill in a mould.
- The gelatine measureA box of gelatine in this period ran to about an ounce, and 2 tablespoons of granulated gelatine is given here as the alternative to the fractional box called for, though the fraction has come through garbled. Two tablespoons is roughly two to two and a half modern 1/4-oz envelopes, which will set the liquid here firmly enough to turn out of a mould; for a softer, spoonable jelly use less.
- The cold water is unclearThe line runs the box measure and the cold water together, and the printed "1½ cup" may be a misreading. Gelatine needs only enough cold liquid to swell in, and since the total liquid governs the set, a smaller quantity than 1½ cups is likely to have been intended.
- The method it points toLemon Jelly is not given here, so the referenced method has to be reconstructed: soak the gelatine in the cold water, pour on the boiling water and stir until completely dissolved with no grains clinging to the spoon, add the sugar, then the coffee, and strain into a wet mould.
- Boiled coffeeThis means coffee made by the period's usual method — grounds boiled with water and cleared with egg shell or cold water — which yields a strong brew. Use two cups of strong brewed coffee, freshly made; stale or reheated coffee tastes flat once chilled and sweetened.
- SweetnessA third of a cup of sugar for this quantity of liquid is restrained, on the assumption that more sugar and cream go on at the table. Taste the warm mixture before moulding; chilling mutes sweetness noticeably.
- Chilling and unmouldingFour hours in the refrigerator will set it; overnight is safer for a mould. Rinse the mould in cold water before filling, and dip it briefly in warm water to release.
- YieldThree cups or more, depending on how the garbled cold-water measure is read; six servings in small moulds or cups. Serve very cold with sugar and cream, as the recipe directs.
Coffee jelly belongs to the great age of gelatine desserts, when commercially packaged granulated gelatine turned what had been a laborious calf's-foot preparation into a matter of measuring spoonfuls from a box. Fannie Farmer's cold-dessert chapter runs through the same formula in a dozen flavours — lemon, orange, wine, coffee — each a variation on soaking, dissolving, sweetening and straining, which is why this entry can dispose of the method in four words. Coffee versions were popular in New England households and, by a separate line of descent, in Japan, where kohii zerii arrived with Western-style cafes and remains a standard item; it is generally traced to the same late-nineteenth-century enthusiasm for clear moulded jellies. Serving it flooded with cream is the period's habit, and still the best treatment: the cream softens coffee's bitterness in a way sugar alone does not.