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Brandy Jelly
Put a little cold water in a saucepan with half a pound of sugar and a couple of ounces of gelatine in small pieces and grate the rind of a lemon in, squeezing in the juice as well. Mix thoroughly and place the saucepan on a hot stove. Beat up in a basin the whites of two eggs and add to the above mixture; grate a little nutmeg, adding six cloves and a bay leaf, mixing well for a minute. Have ready a jelly-bag tied on a stand; stir the preparation, and when it comes to a boil, set back to a cooler part of the stove and continue to stir for six minutes. Put a vessel underneath the jelly-bag and pour the whole of the contents of the pan into the bag, repeating the straining process until the jelly is bright, and then add a gill of brandy. Have in readiness a quart jelly-mould and pour the jelly from the vessel into it and set in a cool place for two hours, then pack it in ice and let it remain there for two hours longer. To remove the jelly from the mould, dip it lightly in warmed water and take it up at once, turn out, wipe neatly, and serve.
A moulded wine jelly of the sort that anchored Victorian and Edwardian dessert tables: clarified with egg white, set hard enough to be turned out of a quart mould, and flavored with brandy stirred in cold at the end. A few of the quantities need translating before this will work.
- The brandy goes in off the heatThis is the hinge. The spirit is added after the jelly has been boiled and strained, so nothing volatile is driven off.
- "A little cold water" is the missing measureThe recipe never states the liquid volume; the quart mould is the only guide, since the strained jelly plus a gill of brandy has to fill it. Around 3 to 3 1/2 cups of water is a reasonable starting point, bearing in mind that the half-pound of sugar adds volume of its own and that some liquid is lost to the egg-white raft and the bag.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces.
- Gelatine has gotten strongerTwo ounces (about 56 g, or eight 1/4-oz envelopes) per quart reflects the variable sheet and shred gelatine of 1896. Modern bloom-standardized powdered gelatin at that rate produces something closer to rubber than to jelly; 1 to 1 1/4 oz (28-35 g) per quart gives a firm jelly that will still unmould cleanly and quiver.
- What the egg whites are doingThey are a clarifying raft, not an enrichment. The recipe adds them beaten to the pan once it is already on the stove; whisking them in while the liquid is still cold is the usual modern practice. Let the mixture come to a boil while stirring, then stop disturbing it hard once the coagulated whites gather the cloudiness. All of it is discarded in the bag.
- The jelly bagA doubled square of damp cheesecloth or a fine jelly bag in a stand over a bowl. Let it drip; squeezing forces fine solids through and undoes the clarification. Pouring the first run back through the same bag a second time is what "until the jelly is bright" means.
- SpicesSix cloves, a bay leaf and grated nutmeg are steeped and strained out, so use them whole and go lightly on the nutmeg -- a few rasps. A bay leaf in a dessert reads as warm and slightly resinous, not savory.
- Setting and unmouldingTwo hours in a cool place then two hours packed in ice is roughly 4 hours in a refrigerator; overnight is safer for a quart mould. The recipe says to dip the mould lightly in warmed water and take it up at once -- a few seconds, no more -- then dry the outside and invert.
- YieldA quart mould serves six to eight, cut in wedges or spooned out. Whipped cream or small dry biscuits are a common accompaniment.
Brandy jelly belongs to the family of clear wine and spirit jellies -- port, sherry, madeira, champagne, punch -- that were standard finishing dishes in nineteenth-century hotel and household cookery, valued precisely because they were transparent. Before packaged gelatine, that clarity was hard-won: cooks boiled calves' feet or dissolved isinglass, then clarified the result with egg white and strained it repeatedly through a flannel jelly bag, and a bright jelly was read as evidence of a careful kitchen. Commercially processed sheet and shredded gelatine, widely available by the last quarter of the century, cut the labor to the straining alone, which is the stage this recipe still insists on. Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name carried The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), was compiling the working repertoire of a large American hotel at the moment the moulded jelly was at its height.