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Jelly with Whipped Cream
Prepare one and one-half pints of clear jelly flavored to taste. Rinse the inside of a cylinder-mould with clear cold water, fill it with the jelly, and stand it on the ice to set. Whip three-fourths of a pint of cream together with a glass of white wine and a little sugar. When the jelly is firm, turn it onto a dish, fill the center with whipped cream, pour a small quantity round the dish, garnish the jelly with candied cherries, and serve.
A moulded gelatin dessert of the sort that closed a great many Waldorf dinners. The recipe assumes you already know how to make "clear jelly," so the work here is in the proportions and the unmoulding.
- What "clear jelly" meansNot fruit preserve but a sweetened, clarified gelatin jelly — wine, lemon, orange or maraschino were among the common flavours. For 1 1/2 pints (3 cups) of liquid, allow roughly 2 to 3 envelopes of powdered gelatin for a jelly firm enough to stand unsupported once turned out.
- The measuresA pint is 16 fl oz, so 1 1/2 pints of jelly is 3 cups and three-fourths of a pint of cream is 1 1/2 cups, which whips to about 3 cups. A "glass" of white wine in this period means a wine glass of roughly 2 to 4 fl oz — the low end is safer here, since liquid works against whipped cream.
- Whip the cream first, then add the wineOscar has you whip cream and wine together, but a few ounces of thin liquid stirred into 1 1/2 cups of cream at the start will keep it from taking air. Whip the cold cream with the sugar to soft peaks, then fold the wine in a spoonful at a time and stop as soon as it holds.
- Cylinder mouldA tall tube or ring mould, so the set jelly has a hollow centre for the cream. A modern angel-food or savarin pan works; a plain bowl will not, since the whole design depends on that well.
- "Stand it on the ice"An icebox instruction — the refrigerator equivalent is 4 to 6 hours, or overnight for a mould this size. The rinse with cold water is not decorative; the film of water is what lets the jelly release cleanly.
- Turning it outDip the mould in warm water for 5 to 10 seconds, no longer, then invert onto a chilled serving dish. Chill the plate first or the base of the jelly will begin to slump before the cream goes in.
- Assemble at the last minuteWine-slackened cream will begin to weep if it stands, and candied cherries can bleed into it. Fill the centre, spoon a little around the base, garnish and take it straight to the table.
- YieldServes 6 to 8 as written.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf in 1893 and published his cookbook in 1896, a volume that reads less like a domestic manual than a record of what a large American hotel kitchen actually sent out. Moulded jellies were central to that repertoire: before commercial gelatin was cheap, clear jelly meant hours of simmering calf's feet or dissolving isinglass, then clarifying with egg white and shell and straining through a flannel bag, and a jelly that arrived transparent and standing upright advertised both the cook's patience and the house's ice supply. By the 1890s sheet and powdered gelatins had cut most of that labour away, which may be one reason such dishes turn up so often in menus of the decade. The pairing with sweetened whipped cream, and the ring of candied cherries, place it squarely in the French service Oscar is generally said to have worked within, where a cold entremets was expected to look built rather than merely spooned.