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Dantzig Sweet Jelly
Clarify from sixteen to twenty leaves of French gelatine, and when it is cold mix with it about one-half pint of Dantzig brandy, and add the syrup required to sweeten. When the jelly is half set, put it on ice, and stir it for a time without allowing it to thicken; then put in two tablespoonfuls of pistachios cut in slices. Pack in ice a cylinder-mould, pour the jelly into it and let it stand for an hour; then dip the mould in tepid water, wipe it thoroughly all round, and turn the jelly out onto a glass dish.
A moulded liqueur jelly of the kind that closed a Waldorf dinner: essentially a clear gelatine set with a flavoured spirit rather than a fruit juice. The original assumes a professional pastry station and leaves the total liquid unstated, which is the first thing to settle.
- The missing quantityOscar never says how much water the gelatine is dissolved in, nor how large the mould is. If you take the finished jelly as roughly a quart, that works out to about 1/2 oz (14 g) of modern powdered gelatine or 7-8 modern sheets per quart of total liquid.
- Gelatine leaves are not what they wereSixteen to twenty leaves sounds enormous because nineteenth-century sheet gelatine was of variable and often weaker setting strength than today's, and because alcohol weakens a set. Modern gold-strength leaves weigh about 2 g each; do not translate leaf for leaf or you will get rubber.
- "Clarify" means what it saysIn this period gelatine was dissolved with sugar syrup and lightly beaten egg white, brought just to a boil, allowed to settle and strained through a jelly bag until glass-clear. The clarity is the whole point of the dish; if you use modern gelatine, filtering through a damp cloth is enough.
- Dantzig brandyThis is Danziger Goldwasser, a caraway-and-anise liqueur carrying flakes of gold leaf, not a grape brandy. Any Goldwasser-style liqueur works; kummel gives a similar flavour without the gold. Half a pint is 1 cup.
- Add the spirit coldThe instruction to mix the liqueur in "when it is cold" is not fussiness: heat drives off the aromatics and the alcohol.
- The hinge: stir at the half-set stageChilling and stirring without letting the jelly thicken is what keeps the pistachios and gold suspended through the mould instead of sinking to the bottom. Stop the moment the mixture begins to hold ribbons.
- Chilling and turning outAn hour packed in ice will take considerably longer in a refrigerator, and a longer chill or overnight does no harm. Dip the mould in tepid, not hot, water briefly, dry it, then invert onto a chilled glass dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no mould size; a quart cylinder mould would serve eight to ten, cut in slices. It is strongly alcoholic, so portions should be small.
Danziger Goldwasser, the liqueur that gives this jelly its name and its glitter, is generally traced to a distillery in Danzig (now Gdansk) founded at the end of the sixteenth century; the caraway-and-anise spirit carried suspended flakes of gold leaf, which made it as much a display as a drink. That is exactly why it appears in a Waldorf dessert list of the 1890s: a clear moulded jelly with gold and sliced pistachios visible through it was a table ornament first and a sweet second, in the tradition of the elaborate aspics and glass-clear jellies that a hotel pastry department used to prove its skill. Oscar Tschirky's book is full of such dishes recorded in shorthand for cooks who already knew how to clarify gelatine, which is why the quantities here read as notes rather than a recipe.