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Jelly or Blancmange for Invalids
1217. Take the bones of a knuckle of veal, well scrape all the meat from them, and stew them four or five hours in two quarts of water; after it is cold, skim it clear from all fat and sediment; melt it, and flavour with home-made wine and a little lemon-peel. If for blancmange, the stock must be still more reduced, to bear the addition of some milk, flavoured with laurel-leaf and lemon-peel: the addition of a little wine or brandy will of course improve it.
A gelatin extraction rather than a dessert in the modern sense: everything depends on getting a firm set from the bones alone, since no leaf gelatine or powder is added. Two quarts of water reduced over four or five hours should come down to roughly a pint of stock that sets solid when chilled.
- Which laurelIn mid-Victorian kitchens "laurel leaf" could mean either sweet bay (Laurus nobilis) or cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus), whose leaves were used for a cheap almond flavour and are cyanogenic. Use only a bay leaf; cherry laurel has no place in food.
- The bonesA veal knuckle sawn into pieces gives the most collagen; ask the butcher to split it. Scraping off every scrap of meat, as directed, keeps the finished jelly clear rather than cloudy and beefy.
- QuantitiesTwo quarts in imperial measure is about 2.3 litres. Reduce well for jelly and further still for blancmange, as directed, so that added milk does not soften the set.
- Testing the setChill a teaspoonful on a cold saucer for ten minutes before you stop reducing. If it does not hold a wobble, keep going; there is no second chance once the milk or wine goes in.
- SkimmingChilling the stock overnight lets the fat lift off in a sheet, which is far more effective than skimming hot. Leave the murky sediment behind in the bowl.
- Home-made wineThis meant a country wine of fruit or flowers, usually sweeter than table wine, though strength varied a good deal. A sweet sherry, madeira or a sweet white does the same job; sweeten to taste, as the stock brings none.
- Milk for the blancmangeInfuse the milk with the bay and lemon peel off the heat for fifteen minutes, then strain and stir it into the warm, not boiling, stock. Boiling milk with acid wine risks curdling.
- Yield and keepingBecause it is an unpreserved meat stock, keep it refrigerated and use within two days.
Invalid cookery had its own chapter in almost every British household book of the period, and gelatinous meat jellies were its centrepiece: calf's-foot jelly, beef tea, veal broth set firm. The reasoning was that a patient who could not chew or digest solids could still be nourished by the concentrated essence of meat, an idea generally traced to eighteenth-century restorative broths and given fresh authority by nineteenth-century enthusiasm for chemical analysis of foods. That the same stock could be turned into a wine jelly for one invalid or a milky blancmange for another shows how thin the line was between medicine and pudding on the sickroom tray. The instruction to flavour with home-made wine, lemon peel and a laurel leaf is a reminder that the underlying material tasted strongly of veal bone and needed disguising.