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Maraschino Jelly
Cut a calf's foot in pieces, place it in a saucepan in cold water, and boil for two minutes; then wash in cold water and again put it in a saucepan with one quart of cold water. When boiling, remove to the side of the fire, and simmer gently for two hours and a half, keeping it well skimmed. After that, strain the liquor into a basin, and leave it until it is quite cold; take off all the fat, and wipe the top off with a cloth dipped in hot water. Turn the jelly onto a basin, scrape off all the sediment, place the jelly in a stewpan, and melt it; then add the juice and rind of a lemon, the whites of two whisked eggs, and loaf-sugar to taste. Whisk this over the fire until boiling, then take it off; rinse a jelly-bag, place the lemon-rind at the bottom and strain the jelly through. Flavor to taste with maraschino, pour it into a mould, and stand it on ice. When it is quite firm, dip the mould in hot water, wipe, turn the jelly onto a dish, and serve.
A Victorian calf's-foot jelly given a liqueur flavoring for the Waldorf dining room. The work is all in the clarification; the flavoring is an afterthought added at the end.
- The hinge: never squeeze the bagOnce the egg-white raft has risen and the mixture has come to a boil, everything must pass through the jelly bag by gravity alone. Pressing or stirring it forces cloudy particles through and the jelly will set murky rather than glass-clear.
- The calf's footA calf's foot, cut in pieces as the recipe directs, is the gelatin source; a butcher can usually order one, and Latin American and halal markets often stock them. One foot to a quart of water should give a reasonably firm set. If you substitute powdered gelatin you skip the two-and-a-half-hour extraction entirely, but you also skip the clarification step this recipe is built around.
- "Remove to the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant off the hot plate to a cooler spot. On a modern burner it means the lowest possible setting, a bare tremble with no rolling bubbles, for the whole two and a half hours. A hard boil emulsifies fat into the stock and no amount of skimming will retrieve it.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone and prized for purity. Ordinary granulated is the equivalent. "To taste" for a quart of jelly generally lands between half and three-quarters of a cup.
- Maraschino means the liqueurNot the syrup from a jar of dyed cherries. This is the clear, faintly bitter-almond spirit distilled from marasca cherries and their crushed stones. Two to three tablespoons in a quart is assertive; add it after the jelly has cooled a little, since alcohol flashes off in a hot pan.
- Chilling"Stand it on ice" means packing or standing the mould in ice; a refrigerator does the same job. Allow at least four hours, and probably overnight for a large decorative mould.
- UnmouldingDipping in hot water means a few seconds only, just long enough to loosen the surface film. Longer and the outer eighth-inch slumps and the pattern blurs.
- YieldThe quart of water is reduced by the long simmering and by clarification, so expect appreciably less than two pints of finished jelly — enough for a small mould and roughly six servings.
Calf's-foot jelly sat in an odd double position in the nineteenth-century kitchen: it was standard invalid food, spooned out to convalescents as something nourishing and easy to swallow, and it was also the base of the elaborate moulded jellies that finished formal dinners. The gelatin came from a cheap cut of the animal, which is why a dish like this reads as luxurious while costing almost nothing in ingredients. Oscar Tschirky's book, drawn from Waldorf practice in the 1890s, catches the technique at a moment when packaged leaf and powdered gelatin were already commercially available. The flavoring is maraschino, the cherry-stone liqueur generally traced to Zara on the Dalmatian coast, which was a fashionable perfume for ices, punches and jellies in American hotel dining rooms of the period and is quite unrelated to the sweet red cocktail cherries that later borrowed its name.