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Rice Jelly
Mix enough water with two tablespoons of rice flour to make a thin paste, and then add one coffee-cup of boiling water. Sweeten to taste, and boil until the rice is transparent. If intended for a person suffering from intestinal trouble, boil it with a stick of cinnamon; if for a fever patient, add, when done, several drops of lemon juice.
Wet a mold with cold water, pour in the jelly, and when cold serve with milk and sugar.
WHEY-This is made with sweet milk and an acid. It contains the sugar, salt and other saline principals necessary for digestion and the repair of the mineral part of the body.
A two-ingredient starch gel from the sickroom chapter, closer to a thin blancmange than a set jelly. The whole thing hinges on cooking the starch long enough that it loses its raw chalkiness and turns glossy.
- Coffee-cupA coffee cup in this period is smaller than a modern mug: usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup to 1 cup (6-8 fl oz). With 2 tablespoons of rice flour the set may be on the soft, spoonable side, though the recipe itself clearly expects it to hold a mold.
- Rice flour, not riceThe recipe says rice flour throughout but then tells you to "boil until the rice is transparent" -- it means the starch paste, which goes from opaque white to translucent and shiny. Ground rice or rice starch both work; modern glutinous (sweet) rice flour sets noticeably stickier.
- Slake the flour firstThe cold-water paste is not optional. Rice flour dropped straight into boiling water lumps instantly and no amount of beating will fully clear it.
- Cooking timeExpect 8-12 minutes at a bare simmer, stirring almost constantly, and use a heavy pan. Starch this thin scorches on the bottom quickly and a burnt note is exactly what an invalid tray does not need.
- SettingWetting the mold with cold water is a release trick that predates non-stick; it still works. A small teacup or ramekin is the right size, and it needs several hours in the refrigerator to firm up.
- The cinnamon and lemonBoth are period therapeutics -- cinnamon as an astringent, lemon as a cooling acid for fever -- and neither has any medical standing now. Treat them as flavourings: one stick simmered in from the start, or a few drops of juice stirred in off the heat.
- YieldOne invalid portion, about 3/4 cup. Serve cold with milk and sugar poured over, as directed; it is bland on its own by design.
- The whey fragmentThe sentences beginning "WHEY" belong to a separate entry that has run on into this one, not part of this recipe. They give no quantities and no method, so there is nothing here to follow.
Rice jelly belongs to a whole class of Victorian and Edwardian "invalid cookery" -- arrowroot, gruel, barley water, beef tea, calf's-foot jelly -- built on the belief that a sick or convalescent stomach could manage only bland, semi-liquid starch and extracted nourishment. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published its cook book in 1911 for the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its magazines, and a chapter of sickroom dishes was standard: nursing at home was the norm, and the cook was expected to produce different food for the fever patient and the patient with "intestinal trouble" from the same basic paste. The nutritional reasoning attached to whey in the trailing lines -- saline principles for "the repair of the mineral part of the body" -- is characteristic of the era's confident but pre-vitamin understanding of diet, written a year before Casimir Funk coined the word "vitamine" in 1912, with isolation coming later still.