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Sauterne Jelly
Soak two tablespoons granulated gelatine in one-half cup cold water, and dissolve in one and one-half cups boiling water. Add one and one-half cups Sauterne, three tablespoons lemon juice, and one cup sugar. Color with leaf green, strain into a shallow pan, chill, and cut in inch cubes. 1/3 lb. prunes 2 cups cold water Boiling water ½ cup cold water
A straightforward wine jelly, set firm enough to cut into cubes and used as a garnish or bedding for other cold desserts as much as a dish in its own right. The trailing lines about prunes and cold water are a printer's fragment from the neighbouring recipe and belong to nothing here.
- Gelatine quantityTwo tablespoons of granulated gelatine is about 2.5 standard quarter-ounce envelopes, roughly 18-20 g. That is a stiff set by modern standards, which is deliberate: the jelly has to hold a clean edge when cut into cubes rather than wobble on a spoon.
- The alcohol stays inThe Sauterne goes in after the boiling water, off the heat, so nothing cooks off. Around a cup and a half of wine in roughly a quart of finished jelly is not trivial, and it is worth knowing before serving it to children.
- What Sauterne means hereSauternes is the sweet botrytised white of Bordeaux. In American books of this period the spelling was often dropped to "Sauterne" and applied loosely to any sweetish white wine. A modern Sauternes will work and will make the jelly sweeter; a dry Riesling or a decent white Bordeaux gives a less cloying result against the full cup of sugar.
- Leaf greenA green colouring of the kind sold for confectionery and cake work, giving a pale spring green. Any gel food colour does the same job; add it a drop at a time, since the jelly reads darker in a mass than it does in the pan. The colour is purely decorative and can be left out.
- Straining and the shallow panStrain to catch undissolved gelatine and any lemon pulp, which would otherwise show as cloudy flecks in a jelly meant to be clear. A shallow pan means a layer about an inch deep, so a standard 8-inch square tin is right; deeper than that and the cubes will not be cubes.
- ChillingGive it at least four hours in the refrigerator, and overnight is better for clean cutting. Dip a thin knife in hot water between cuts and lift the cubes out with a spatula.
- YieldAbout a quart of jelly, or roughly six to eight servings on its own. As a garnish scattered over fruit, whipped cream or a moulded cream, it will stretch much further.
Wine jellies were a fixture of American genteel cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and their appearance in Fannie Farmer's book comes at a time when the making of them was changing. Earlier households extracted their own gelatine by boiling calf's feet or isinglass for hours, a job that made jelly a dish of some standing; by the 1890s packaged granulated gelatine was cheap and reliable, and a clear jelly was within much easier reach. The Boston Cooking School Cook Book is full of the consequences, including this one: a jelly stiff enough to be cut into cubes and used as a decorative element rather than served as the dessert itself. Sauternes had a particular cachet in America at the time, and the green colouring reflects a period taste for tinted, jewel-like garnishes on the cold table.