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Kummel Jelly
Pour one quart of cold water into a saucepan with one-half pound of granulated sugar, two ounces of gelatine broken into small pieces, and the grated rind of a medium-sized lemon, squeezing in the juice also. Thoroughly mix, and set the saucepan on a hot stove. Beat up the whites of two eggs, add them to the other mixture grate in one saltspoonful of nutmeg, add half a dozen cloves and one bay leaf, and stir well with a whisk for one minute. Have in readiness a jelly-bag tied on a stand. Stir the mixture, and when ready to boil place it on a cooler part of the stove to keep it from overflowing, stirring it while boiling for six minutes. Put a vessel under the jelly-bag, remove the pan from the fire, and pour all into a bag, adding immediately one gill of kummel. Allow it to drain into the vessel, and then return it to the bag, placing another vessel underneath, and drain again for fully two hours. Have ready a quart jelly-mould, pour the jelly from the vessel into it, set it aside to cool for two hours, and then pack it in ice and let harden for two hours longer. Dip the mould into lukewarm water, turn the contents out on a dish, and serve at once.
A clarified wine-style jelly, here flavored with caraway liqueur. The hinge is that the kummel goes in after the pan leaves the heat, so none of the alcohol or its aroma boils off.
- A gill of kummelOne gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. Kummel is a clear caraway-and-cumin liqueur, still made (Wolfschmidt and Gilka are the usual bottles); it is sweet, so account for that alongside the half pound of sugar.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Grate the nutmeg fresh — the pre-ground jar will not carry through a clarified jelly the same way.
- Two ounces of gelatineThat is eight quarter-ounce envelopes of modern powdered gelatin to one quart of liquid, which will set very stiff indeed. The recipe only says the gelatine is 'broken into small pieces', so the form is unclear; nineteenth-century gelatine was in any case less standardized than today's product and may well have been weaker. With today's gelatin, three to four envelopes per quart gives a jelly firm enough to unmold cleanly and still pleasant to eat. Soften the gelatin in a little of the cold water before it goes in.
- The egg whites are clarification, not enrichmentBeaten whites coagulate as the liquid heats and trap the haze and the spice debris, which is why the mixture is then strained. Note that the original directs stirring with a whisk throughout the six-minute boil; modern clarification practice is to stop stirring once the raft forms, on the grounds that breaking it clouds the result.
- Jelly-bag and the second strainingA double layer of dampened cheesecloth in a fine sieve set over a bowl does the job. Pouring the first run back through the bag is deliberate: the coagulated egg becomes the filter, and the second pass is what gives a clear jelly. Let it drip; squeezing forces sediment through.
- "A hot stove" and "a cooler part"On a range this is high heat, then low. Boiling six minutes is fine here — the point is to fully dissolve the gelatin and set the egg, and the liqueur is not yet in the pot.
- Packing in iceChill the filled mold in the refrigerator for four hours or more instead. The original's two hours at room temperature followed by ice was a nineteenth-century workaround; there is no reason to reproduce it.
- Unmolding and yieldA brief dip in lukewarm water and an inverted plate is still the method; if it resists, dip again for a few seconds rather than longer. A quart mold serves six to eight as a dessert course.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, published in an era when the clear molded jelly was the mark of a competent pastry department — a dish judged almost entirely on transparency, which is why so much of the method here is filtration rather than cooking. Kümmel itself is a caraway-flavored liqueur generally traced to the Low Countries and later strongly associated with Germany and the Baltic, where the Allasch style near Riga gave it a lasting reputation; it reached American hotel bars as a digestif and turned up, as here, in the desserts as well. Flavoring a jelly with a spirit was standard practice — period books carry versions made with sherry, Madeira, and maraschino — and the caraway version reads as a Continental note on a New York menu.