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Kirsch
1/3 cup orange juice 3 tablespoons lemon juice Fruit red Soak gelatine twenty minutes in cold water, dissolve in hot water, add sugar, fruit juices, Sherry, brandy, and enough Kirsch to make one cup of strong liquor, then color with fruit red. Strain, mould, and chill. Serve with or without Cream Sauce I.
This is a moulded wine jelly, and the page as transcribed has lost the top of its ingredient list — the gelatine, sugar, water and the measures of Sherry, brandy and Kirsch are all missing. What survives is the method, which is sound, but the proportions have to be reconstructed.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the orange and lemon juice carry measures here. In Farmer's other moulded wine jellies the working ratio is about 2 tablespoons granulated gelatine soaked in 1/2 cup cold water, dissolved in 1 pint boiling water, with 1 cup sugar, for roughly 1 quart of finished jelly. Treat that as an analogue, not a transcription of what is absent.
- "Enough Kirsch to make one cup of strong liquor""Enough Kirsch to make one cup of strong liquor" most likely means the combined Sherry, brandy and Kirsch, with the Kirsch topped up last so that the three spirits together measure one cup, leaving the fruit juices outside that count. The text does not spell this out.
- Gelatine has changedPeriod granulated gelatine was coarser than modern powder and is usually reckoned weaker, though the two are hard to compare directly. One envelope of today's unflavoured gelatine is a scant tablespoon (about 2 1/4 teaspoons) and will set 2 cups of liquid firmly — less if the liquid is heavily alcoholic. Sheet gelatine works too, soaked in cold water until limp, then squeezed.
- Alcohol fights the setA full cup of 40-percent spirit in a quart of jelly meaningfully weakens the gel. The recipe has the gelatine soaked and fully dissolved in hot water before the spirits are added; adding them at the end also keeps them from being boiled off, though the text does not say so.
- Soaking and dissolvingTwenty minutes in cold water is for the granulated product; modern powder blooms in five. Dissolve in water hot enough to clear it completely — around 120-140F is plenty — and check against the light for undissolved grains before straining.
- "Fruit red"A commercial liquid colouring of the period, in some brands probably cochineal- or carmine-based. Any red food colouring does the same job; a few drops only, since the intent is a clear ruby jelly rather than an opaque one.
- Straining is not optionalCitrus juice carries pulp and gelatine can leave threads. Pour through a fine sieve or muslin into the mould, or the jelly turns from translucent to cloudy.
- Chilling and unmouldingWet the mould before filling. Allow at least four hours, better overnight; dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert. A quart mould serves six to eight.
- Cream Sauce IThe cross-reference is to a dessert sauce elsewhere in the book, not the savoury white sauce of the same name; its exact composition cannot be verified from this page, so check the original entry before substituting.
Kirschwasser is a clear, unaged eau-de-vie distilled from whole black cherries, stones included, which is where its faint bitter-almond note comes from; the name is simply German for "cherry water" and the spirit is generally traced to the Black Forest and the upper Rhine. Moulded wine jellies were a standing feature of American cold-dessert chapters by the turn of the century, though the dish predates commercial granulated gelatine; from the 1890s that product made it easier than the older calf's-foot method. The book gives a run of jellies built on one skeleton with the flavouring swapped. The tinting with "fruit red" belongs to a period taste for jellies that arrived at the table looking like a jewel, with the colour coming from the bottle rather than the fruit.