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Cherry Jelly
Remove the stalks and stones from two or three pounds of cherries, place them in a basin, pound the kernels and squeeze in the juice of three lemons through a sieve. Mash the cherries with a wooden spoon, adding about one teacupful of red currant jelly; then add the kernels and stir all well together. Boil and skim one pint of clarified sugar and isinglass, put the cherries into a jelly bag, pour this syrup over them and pass it through until quite clear. If it is not sweet enough add more sugar; if too sweet add more lemon-juice. Dampen a mould, pack it in ice, fill it with the jelly and turn it out when firm and well set.
This is a nineteenth-century moulded fruit jelly, and its flavouring is the problem. The pounded cherry kernels are not a garnish or a stylistic flourish; they are stirred in raw and left in contact with the fruit, and that is where the recipe fails on modern safety grounds.
- The kernels are the hazardCherry stones contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside. Crushing the kernels and mixing them into moist fruit pulp allows the enzymatic release of hydrogen cyanide, and the kernels are never properly cooked here: the syrup is boiled separately and merely poured over them.
- The quantity is out of rangeTwo or three pounds of cherries yields on the order of a hundred and fifty to two hundred stones. The crushed kernels are strained out in the jelly bag rather than eaten, but whatever they release passes into the liquid, and the jelly is then served cold.
- Why cooks did it anywayThe kernels were prized for a bitter-almond note, the same flavour sold as noyau or ratafia. Prussic acid was known to nineteenth-century writers, and some cookery books of the period did caution over bitter almonds, yet kernels went on being used for the flavour.
- IsinglassThe setting agent here is isinglass, a collagen gelatine prepared from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish. It has effectively vanished from the domestic market outside brewing and fining, and no strength equivalence to modern sheet or powdered gelatine can be given honestly from this text.
- Clarified sugar"Clarified sugar" means a sugar syrup boiled with egg white and skimmed to remove impurities — a step made unnecessary by modern refined sugar. Oscar gives no density or ratio for it, so the sweetness of the finished jelly is unmeasurable from the page.
- Packed in iceThe recipe says only to dampen the mould and pack it in ice; no refrigeration is involved and no salt or ice cave is specified in the text. It is a chilling method, not a food-safety control.
- If you want cherry jellyUse a current recipe. A modern set fruit jelly reaches the same result with gelatine and stoned fruit, and the almond note, if wanted, comes from an extract rather than from crushed stones.
Oscar Tschirky, the ma tre d'h tel whose name sat on the cover of this 1896 volume, was not a cook by trade but a floor man with an encyclopaedic memory for what wealthy diners ate, and the book reads as a record of a large hotel kitchen's repertoire rather than a domestic manual. Moulded jellies of this kind were showpieces of that repertoire: clear, quivering, turned out whole onto a cold platter, and dependent on an ice cave and a jelly bag. The flavouring of cherry preparations with their own pounded kernels is an old European practice, often associated with the same taste for bitter-almond flavour that produced noyau, crème de noyaux and ratafia, and it is said to have persisted in professional kitchens for some time afterwards. Isinglass, the fish-derived gelatine that sets this jelly, was one of several clarifying and setting agents in use in the period, alongside calf's-foot and commercial gelatines, and it was steadily displaced by leaf and powdered gelatines in the decades after this book appeared.