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Madeira Jelly
Dissolve three ounces of gelatine and one-half pound of lump-sugar in one quart of water, and then strain it through a fine hair-sieve. Mix one and one-half pints of Madeira wine with the strained liquor, turn the whole into a copper whipping-bowl packed in ice, and whip the jelly well. In about twenty minutes time remove the jelly from the ice, and whip it for ten minutes longer. If it has come to be too firm, stand the bowl in a large basin of hot water, and whip it for another minute or two. When beaten to a stiff froth, pour the jelly into a mould, pack it in ice, and leave it for a couple of hours or so. When ready to serve, dip the mould in warm water to loosen the contents, then wipe the edges of the mould and turn out the jelly.
This is a whipped wine jelly — a mousse-like froth rather than a clear moulded jelly — and almost everything that can go wrong with it happens in the first two minutes.
- Dissolve the gelatine properlyThe instruction assumes you know to soften the gelatine and dissolve it with the sugar in hot, not cold, water; nothing sets or strains cleanly otherwise. Bloom powdered gelatine in a little of the cold water first, then dissolve it in the rest heated to about 140F, well short of a boil.
- Three ounces is a great deal of gelatineThat is roughly twelve 1/4-oz envelopes for about seven cups of liquid — some three times a modern setting ratio. Period gelatine was weaker and less consistent, and a jelly meant to be whipped and hold air must be set firmer than a spooned one. With today's product, a third to half that quantity gives a froth that still turns out of a mould.
- Lump sugarHalf a pound of loaf or lump sugar is a generous cup — closer to a cup and an eighth — of granulated sugar. The lump form mattered when refined sugar was sold in cones and cut down at home.
- UnitsA quart of water is 4 cups; one and a half pints of Madeira is 3 cups. The finished volume is about seven cups before whipping, and considerably more after.
- The wine is never cookedThree cups of Madeira go in cold and stay uncooked, so the alcohol remains. Serve accordingly, and use a decent medium-dry Madeira — Sercial or Verdelho — since nothing here will hide a poor one.
- The copper bowl and the iceCopper is incidental; any metal bowl will do. What matters is whipping over ice so the mixture thickens and holds air at the same time. Start whipping while it is still liquid, not after it has set.
- If it stiffens too farThe hot-water rescue is sound and worth knowing: a jelly that has gone solid before it is aerated can be softened over warm water and rewhipped. Work in short bursts — melt it too far and the trapped air escapes.
- UnmouldingDip the mould in warm water for five to ten seconds only. A whipped jelly is aerated and softer than a clear one, so it will slump if overwarmed.
- YieldWhipped to a stiff froth this makes well over two quarts and wants a large mould; it serves twelve or more. Best eaten the day it is made, before the foam begins to weep.
Wine jellies were a fixture of the late-nineteenth-century restaurant dessert list, and Madeira was the wine American kitchens reached for by long habit: fortified for the Atlantic crossing, it survived cellars and heat that ruined table wines, and it had been a staple of East Coast dining rooms since the colonial trade. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, worked in a kitchen where gelatine cookery was a display craft — clear jellies, aspics, moulded creams — and the whipped variant here is the lighter branch of it, a jelly beaten over ice until it doubles and turns opaque, closer to a mousse than to the trembling glass domes on the same menus. That the recipe assumes the cook knows to heat the water, to whip before setting, and to judge firmness by feel is typical of professional writing of the period, which was addressed to people who had already stood at the bowl.