Home › Cold Desserts › Coffee Jelly
Coffee Jelly
For coffee jelly take one-half box of gelatine, one pint of strong coffee and three-fourths of a pound of sugar. Soak gelatine and pour the coffee over it. When dissolved, stir in the sugar, add one-half pint of boiling water, strain into molds and serve with whipped cream.
ORANGE or GRAPEFRUIT BASKETS-Cut two pieces from the fruit leaving it in shape of a basket with handle. With an orange spoon remove pulp and place the fruit shells in ice water in order to keep them firm until needed. Use the fruit juice to flavor jelly or Bavarian Cream with which to fill the baskets. For elaborate occasions the handle of the basket may be decorated with a single flower or a ribbon bow.
A straightforward moulded gelatine dessert, but the measurements are written for a 1900 pantry and need translating before you start.
- Half a box of gelatineBox sizes were not standardised in the period, but half a box is usually read as about 1/2 oz (14 g) of granulated gelatine, the equivalent of two modern envelopes. That will set the three cups of liquid here into a firm, sliceable jelly that unmoulds cleanly.
- Soak it in whatThe instruction to "soak gelatine" assumes you know it means cold water — granulated gelatine must swell in cold liquid before it meets anything hot. Use about 1/2 cup of cold water, let it stand five minutes, then pour the hot coffee over. Note that this soaking water is extra liquid the recipe never counts, so the finished jelly is slightly softer than the stated proportions suggest.
- The coffee must be hotThe recipe says "pour the coffee over it" without saying so, but the pint of strong coffee needs to be hot enough to dissolve the bloomed gelatine completely. Undissolved grains give a grainy, weeping jelly. Do not boil gelatine hard; a bare steam is enough.
- "Strong coffee"Read this as roughly double-strength drip coffee, or brewed at about two tablespoons of grounds per cup. The half-pint of boiling water added at the end dilutes everything by a third, so weak coffee here produces a jelly that tastes of nothing but sugar.
- Three-quarters of a pound of sugarThat is about 1 3/4 cups, in 3 cups of liquid — extremely sweet by current taste. Half that amount suits most palates now, and the jelly will still set, since sugar is not what makes it firm.
- StrainingStraining into the moulds through fine cloth or a fine sieve catches coffee sediment and any undissolved gelatine. It is worth doing; the point of the dessert is clarity.
- Setting and unmouldingFour hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. Dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert. The Victorian kitchen would have had ice; a modern refrigerator sets it faster and more reliably.
- YieldThree cups of jelly serves six in small moulds, or four generously. The whipped cream is not optional in spirit — unsweetened cream is what balances the sugar.
- The fruit basketsA second entry running on from the recipe under its own heading. Hollowed orange or grapefruit shells are filled with jelly or Bavarian Cream and chilled until firm, then served whole with the handle intact. Grapefruit and orange juice used to flavour a gelatine dessert cause no setting problems; fresh pineapple, kiwi and papaya do, and should be avoided.
Coffee jelly belongs to the great age of moulded gelatine, which began in earnest once commercially granulated gelatine became cheap and reliable in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Before that, a cook wanting jelly boiled calves' feet for hours or dissolved isinglass; afterwards, a boxed powder made an elegant clear dessert available to any household with a mould and a cold larder, which is exactly why books like the Butterick — aimed at the ambitious middle-class housekeeper — carried page after page of them. Coffee jelly is often said to have been a New England favourite in particular, and it appears in American cookbooks throughout the period, usually served just as it is here, with plain or whipped cream. It largely disappeared from American tables after the mid-twentieth century, but survives vigorously in Japan as kōhī zerī, widely sold today. The orange-basket note that follows is a reminder that this was as much a book about presentation as cooking: the ribbon bow on the handle is pure Edwardian table theatre.