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Wine Jelly II
1/2 box gelatine or. 2½ tablespoons granulated gelatine ½ cup cold water 1⅔ cups boiling water 1 cup sugar ½ cup Sherry wine 2 tablespoons brandy 1/3 cup orange juice. 3 tablespoons lemon juice. Fruit red.
This is the second of two wine jelly formulas in the book, and it is printed as a bare ingredient list because it borrows the method from the preceding recipe: soften the gelatine in the cold water, dissolve it in the boiling water with the sugar, strain, add the wine and brandy off the heat, and chill in a mould. The fractions as transcribed have been mangled in digitization and need reading with care.
- The fractions are corruptThe fractions look corrupt: "1½ cup cold water" and "12½ cups boiling water" are most likely ½ cup and 2½ cups, with a stray 1 attached to each ½, and the sherry likewise ½ cup rather than 1½ (note the singular "cup"). Read straight, the recipe would call for more than fifteen cups of liquid to two and a half tablespoons of gelatine, which would never set.
- Check the ratio, not the textA wine jelly firm enough to unmould wants roughly 1 tablespoon of granulated gelatine to 2 cups of total liquid. Add up the water and wine you actually use and scale the gelatine to that, and the corrupted numbers stop mattering.
- Granulated gelatine then and nowA modern envelope of granulated gelatine holds a scant tablespoon (about 7 g / ¼ oz), so two and a half tablespoons is roughly two and a half envelopes.
- Soak, then dissolveThe cold water is a soaking step, not an ingredient in its own right: the granules must swell for five minutes before the boiling water goes in, or you get undissolved grit that settles as a cloudy layer at the bottom of the mould.
- Add the wine off the heatSherry and brandy go in after the gelatine is fully dissolved and the mixture has stopped steaming. Heating the wine drives off the aromatics that are the whole point of the dish, and a high proportion of alcohol also weakens the set.
- StrainFarmer's wine jellies are meant to be transparent. Pour through a fine sieve lined with a double thickness of cheesecloth and do not squeeze it, or the jelly turns hazy.
- Chilling and unmouldingFour to six hours in the refrigerator for a 1-quart mould, or overnight. Dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a wetted plate so the jelly can be slid into position.
- YieldRead sensibly, something over 3 cups (½ cup cold water, 2½ cups boiling water and ½ cup sherry, plus the dissolved sugar), which serves six in small moulds or fills a 1-quart mould. Traditionally served plain, with whipped cream, or chopped and spooned around fruit.
Wine jelly belongs to the long tradition of clear moulded jellies that ran from calf's-foot jelly, boiled for hours from bones and skin and clarified with egg white, to the packaged gelatine that made the same dish an afternoon's work. Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) appeared just as commercially granulated gelatine was becoming a reliable pantry staple in American households, and the book's cold-dessert chapter reflects that: sheets of isinglass and calf's-foot stock have given way to measured spoonfuls from a box. Wine jelly in particular had a double life. It was a dinner-party dessert, poured into fluted moulds and turned out glittering, and it was also standard invalid cookery, recommended for the sickroom because it was light, easily swallowed, and mildly fortifying — a reputation that survived well into the twentieth century in hospital diets.