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Jamaica Jelly
Boil one pound of sugar together with two ounces of clarified isinglass and one wineglassful of Jamaica rum until reduced to a clear jelly. Rinse a mould out with cold water, pour the jelly into it and stand it in a cool place. When firm and cold turn the jelly onto a glass dish, arrange round it some small bunches of grapes, pour over thick cream, and serve.
A late-Victorian moulded jelly of the plainest kind: sugar, setting agent, rum. The proportions as printed assume a kitchen that kept prepared isinglass on hand, so the liquid quantity has to be read between the lines.
- IsinglassDried collagen from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, sold in sheets or shreds and soaked, then boiled and strained to "clarify" it. It has been almost entirely replaced by leaf and powdered gelatin, which is what a modern cook would use.
- The missing liquidTwo ounces of clarified isinglass may mean two ounces of the dry material or two ounces of the prepared solution, and no water is specified at all. The recipe cannot be scaled honestly without that figure; treat it as a description of a method rather than a set of working quantities.
- A wineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about two fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Jamaica rum meant dark, heavy pot-still rum, not a light white rum.
- Boiling and alcoholBoiling the rum with the syrup drives off much of the alcohol and concentrates the molasses character of the spirit. If you want the rum to read clearly, it is normally stirred in off the heat once the jelly base has been made.
- Setting the mouldRinsing the mould in cold water and leaving it wet is what lets the jelly release cleanly; do not dry or grease it. "A cool place" means a larder in 1896 and the refrigerator now, several hours or overnight.
- Turning outDip the mould briefly in warm, not hot, water and invert onto a chilled dish. A sugar-heavy jelly softens fast at the surface, so work quickly.
- Grapes and creamSmall bunches would have been left on the stem, serving as decoration as much as garnish. "Thick cream" is unwhipped heavy cream, poured at the table.
- YieldA pound of sugar points to a good-sized mould, but with no liquid quantity given the finished volume and number of servings can only be guessed at.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a vast compendium that mixed hotel service dishes with the standard household repertoire of the day. Moulded jellies were near the centre of that repertoire: they showed off a cook's clarifying skill and a household's ability to keep something cold, and isinglass was the prestige setting agent before commercial powdered gelatin made the job trivial. The Jamaica in the title is doing the same work as the name on a bottle — dark Jamaican rum was the standard heavy rum of the American bar and pantry, and flavouring a clear jelly with it was a way of putting a familiar strong flavour into a genteel dessert form. Rum jellies of this type are generally traced to the English "punch jelly" tradition, where a moulded jelly was simply a bowl of punch given a shape.