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Kirsch Jelly with Cherries
Put in some syrup boiled at thirty degrees one pound of morello cherries, and boil them for five minutes. Put in a stewpan two ounces of gelatine, the beaten whites of three eggs, one pound of sugar and three pints of water, with the juice of a lemon. Whisk it over the fire until it boils, turn it out and add one and one-half teacupfuls of kirsch after it is cold. Crack about fifty cherry stones, blanch and peel the kernels, drain the cherries, and put a layer first of jelly and then of cherries and a sprinkling of the kernels in a plain cylinder-mould, and keep on in this way till the mould is full. Cover with a tin sheet, pack it in ice, put ice on the tin, and let the jelly freeze for two hours. Turn it out of the mould onto an ornamental dish. The jelly may be garnished with crystallized fruits.
This is a moulded clear jelly, clarified with egg white and set in a bed of ice rather than a refrigerator. The problem is not the technique but the fifty cracked cherry stones folded through it.
- The cherry kernels are the reason to stopKernels from cherries, apricots, peaches and bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is chewed, crushed or left in contact with moisture. Fifty blanched kernels distributed through a single mould, eaten uncooked, is well outside any margin that could be called incidental.
- Nothing in the method destroys itThe kernels are blanched and peeled, not cooked, and they are layered into a jelly that is then chilled rather than heated. Amygdalin is not removed by peeling, and the kirsch does nothing to it. A current recipe using cherry-kernel flavour relies on commercially prepared extracts held to a controlled level.
- Why the kernels were there at allCracked stones were a common way to get the almond-marzipan note that goes with cherries before extracts were commonplace. The flavour compound and the toxic one come from the same source, which is one reason the practice fell out of use.
- "Syrup boiled at thirty degrees"A Baume hydrometer reading, the professional way of specifying sugar density in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Thirty degrees Baume is a heavy syrup, roughly the strength used for poaching and candying fruit, not a temperature.
- Two ounces of gelatineThis most likely means sheet gelatine in a kitchen of this kind, and period gelatine was more variable in strength than modern powdered gelatine, which is part of why the quantity looks high against three pints of liquid. Sheet and powder are not reliably interchangeable by weight.
- Teacupful and morelloA teacupful in this period is usually taken as about six fluid ounces, smaller than a modern cup. Morellos are the dark sour cherries still sold frozen or jarred; sweet cherries will not give the same acidity against the sugar.
- Freezing in the mouldPacking the covered mould in ice with more ice laid on the tin lid is the pre-refrigeration way of setting a jelly firm enough to unmould whole. Two hours in ice sets it; it is not meant to freeze solid like an ice.
- If you want the dishWork from a current recipe for kirsch jelly with cherries, one that flavours the jelly with kirsch and a proprietary almond extract and leaves the stones out.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the repertoire of a large hotel kitchen at the point when French pastry practice was the house standard in New York, and this is a straightforward gelee au kirsch of the kind Careme's successors moulded in cylinders and turned out onto ornamental dishes. Clarifying with beaten egg white, specifying syrup by Baume degrees and setting the mould in a cave of ice are all professional habits rather than domestic ones. Cracking the stones for their kernels was routine in that tradition; cherry, apricot and peach kernels were a normal flavouring for creams, ratafias and jellies well into the twentieth century, and the noyau liqueurs made from them survive as a memory of the practice.