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Jelly in Glasses
Use recipe for Wine or Russian Jelly. Fill Apollinaris glasses three-fourths full, reserving one-fourth of the mixture, which, after cooling, is to be beaten until frothy (using a Dover egg-beater) and placed on top of jelly in glasses which represents freshly drawn lager beer. This is a most attractive way of serving jelly to one who is ill.
This is a presentation trick rather than a formula: the whole effect depends on catching the reserved gelatin at exactly the right stage of setting. The base recipe is the book's Wine Jelly or Russian Jelly, both gelatin desserts set with sherry, Madeira or lemon.
- The hinge: when to beatThe reserved quarter must be beaten when it has thickened to the consistency of raw egg white — cool to the touch but not yet firm. Beat it warm and it will never hold air; let it set solid and it breaks into curds instead of foam. Chill the bowl in ice water and test every few minutes.
- Apollinaris glassesTall, narrow tumblers named for the German mineral water served in them. Any straight-sided highball glass or small pilsner gives the same beer-glass illusion; the narrow shape is what makes the foam sit up in a head.
- Dover egg-beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater, a common beater in the late nineteenth-century American kitchen. A balloon whisk or an electric hand mixer on medium does the job; a stand mixer is too large for the quantity.
- GelatinModern envelopes hold about 1/4 oz (7 g) and set 2 cups of liquid to a sliceable jelly — check the base recipe's liquid volume against that ratio rather than assuming the older boxes or sheets match.
- The wineWine jelly is not cooked after the wine goes in, so the alcohol stays; substitute strong lemonade or grape juice with a little extra sugar if alcohol is unwanted.
- Assembly orderPour the clear three-quarters first and let it set fully in the refrigerator, an hour or more, before spooning the froth on top. Added too early, the foam sinks and you get a cloudy middle instead of two clean layers.
- YieldDepends on the quantity the base jelly recipe makes and the size of the glasses. They hold several hours in the refrigerator, but the froth slowly weeps and the head collapses by the next day.
This entry belongs to the substantial body of nineteenth-century "invalid cookery" — dishes designed for people confined to bed, where appetite had to be coaxed by appearance as much as flavor. Gelatin desserts were the workhorse of that genre: cool, easy to swallow, and thought to be nourishing in an era when convalescents were fed little else. The joke here is the point. Apollinaris water, bottled at the Apollinaris spring in Germany's Ahr valley and widely imported to American tables by the 1890s, came in tall narrow glasses of a sort that could pass for beer glasses, so a layer of amber jelly capped with pale froth reads unmistakably as a freshly drawn lager. Serving a bedridden patient — "one who is ill," as the recipe puts it — something that looked like a glass of beer was a small piece of theater, and the fact that anyone bothered to record it says a good deal about how much presentation was expected to do in the sickroom.