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Lemon Jelly
Steep two ounces of gelatine in one-half pint of cold water for one hour; then mix with it one and one-half pints of boiling water, brandy or sherry wine, the thinly-pared peel of one and the juice of three lemons, and sugar to taste. Boil all for five minutes, then remove it from the fire and allow it to cool; stir in quickly the crushed shells and beaten whites of two eggs, and boil the jelly up again without stirring. Allow it to settle for two minutes, strain through a jelly-bag, and stir in one-half pint of sherry mixed with a little brandy; pour the jelly into a fancy jelly-mould and leave till set. When ready to serve, turn the jelly out onto a dish.
A Victorian moulded wine jelly, clarified the old way with egg shells and whites. The technique is sound; the gelatine quantity is the one figure that needs rethinking, since modern powdered gelatine is far stronger than the sheet product Oscar's kitchen bought by the pound.
- Gelatine, reducedTwo ounces is roughly eight quarter-ounce envelopes, which with about five cups of total liquid would give something closer to rubber than jelly. For a moulded jelly firm enough to turn out, count on one envelope per 1 to 1 1/2 cups of liquid — three to five envelopes here.
- The liquid, totalledHalf a pint cold water, one and a half pints boiling, half a pint sherry: about five cups, or 1.2 litres. That fills a standard 1 1/2-quart mould with a little to spare.
- An ambiguous lineThe first list reads "boiling water, brandy or sherry wine" with no quantity attached to the spirits, and the measured half pint of sherry comes later. Read the early mention as a splash for flavour, or leave it out entirely — the wine that matters goes in after clarifying.
- Why the wine goes in lastAlcohol added after the boil keeps its aroma, but it also weakens a gel. Stir the sherry in while the strained jelly is still warm and liquid, and expect a softer set than a plain water jelly at the same gelatine ratio.
- Don't boil it hard or longSustained boiling degrades gelatine and costs you setting power. Bring it just to the boil for the clarification, and treat the five minutes as generous.
- The clarificationThe crushed shells and beaten whites must go into liquid that has cooled to around blood heat, or they cook into shreds instead of forming a raft. Once it rises, do not stir — that is the whole point of the instruction, and stirring puts the sediment straight back into suspension.
- StrainingA jelly-bag is a cone of scalded flannel or muslin; a double layer of damp cheesecloth in a sieve does the same job. Let it drip and never squeeze, and pass the first cloudy runnings through a second time.
- Setting and turning outFour to six hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. To unmould, dip the mould to its rim in warm water for five to ten seconds, loosen the edge with a fingertip, and invert onto a wetted dish so the jelly can be slid into position.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 quarts, serving eight to ten as a dessert. Sugar is left "to taste"; something in the region of a cup suits a jelly meant to follow dinner.
Clear wine jelly in a fancy mould was the showpiece of the nineteenth-century cold table, and its ancestor is calf's-foot jelly — days of simmering trotters, skimming, and clarifying to get a liquid clear enough to see a candle through. Commercially prepared gelatine, sold in sheets and later in granulated packets, collapsed that labour into an hour of soaking. What survived from the older method is the egg-shell-and-white clarification, which is not about the gelatine at all but about the lemon pulp and sugar scum: the coagulating protein traps the fine particles and floats them off as a raft. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, compiled his 1896 book from the house repertoire, and jellies like this one appear alongside the aspics and chaud-froids — the sherry and brandy mark it as an adult dish rather than a nursery one.