Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Rum Jelly
Rum Jelly
Put one ounce of gelatine into a basin with two breakfast cupfuls of cold water, and let it soak; then add the strained juice and thin rind of two lemons, eight ounces of stick cinnamon, a little grated nutmeg, and finally pour in one and one-half teacupfuls of rum. Beat well, pour the mixture into a saucepan over the fire, and stir until the gelatine has dissolved; then add the well-whisked whites of two eggs, and after it has boiled for two or three minutes pass it through a jelly-bag, continuing to strain until the jelly runs through clear; then stir in one wineglassful of brandy. Turn the jelly into a mould packed in ice, let it get quite firm; then turn it out onto a dish, and serve.
A molded punch jelly of the sort every large hotel kitchen turned out by the dozen. Two things in the original need attention before you start: there is no sugar anywhere in it, and the quantity of cinnamon is almost certainly a printer's error.
- The cinnamon is wrongEight ounces of stick cinnamon is roughly a hundred three-inch quills — enough to make a bitter, medicinal infusion and to soak up much of the liquid. Read it as a stick or two, or about a quarter ounce, which is what a jelly of this size wants.
- No sugar is listedComparable wine and punch jellies of the period are generally sweetened, often with several ounces of sugar to a quart of liquid. Without it this sets into a sour, spirituous block rather than a dessert. Add sugar with the water and gelatine so it dissolves before the mixture boils.
- Old measuresA breakfast cup is 8 to 10 oz, so read "two breakfast cupfuls" as 2 cups of water. A teacup is smaller, about 5 to 6 oz, making a cup and a half of teacupfuls roughly a scant cup of rum. A wineglassful is 2 oz. One ounce of gelatine is four ¼-oz envelopes.
- Why so much gelatineAlcohol interferes with gelatine's set, and this jelly is about a third spirits by volume. The generous ounce is deliberate, not excessive. Modern granulated gelatine is likely to be stronger and more consistent than much of what was sold in 1896, so expect a firm, sliceable jelly rather than a wobbling one.
- The egg whites are a clarifying raft, not an ingredientWhisked whites are stirred into the warm mixture as the recipe directs, brought up to a boil, and trap the cloudy matter as they coagulate. They are removed entirely in the jelly bag. Do not stir once the raft forms, and let the jelly drip through without squeezing the bag or it will go cloudy again.
- StrainingA jelly bag can be replaced by a double layer of rinsed muslin or a coffee filter in a sieve. Keep the jelly warm while it drips, and pass the first cloudy runnings back through the bed of egg white as the recipe directs.
- The brandy goes in off the heatThat is the point of adding it last — it carries the aroma that boiling has driven out of the rum. Taste at this stage; boiling costs the jelly some of its alcoholic bite and it may want a little more.
- SettingIce-packed molds were the usual hotel method. A refrigerator does the same work in 4 to 6 hours, overnight for certainty. Rinse the mold with cold water first, and unmold by dipping the base in warm water for a few seconds.
- YieldRoughly a quart of jelly — a 1-quart mold, serving six to eight. It is potent; small portions, and it can be served with whipped cream or small dry biscuits.
Oscar Tschirky came to the original Waldorf in 1893 and spent the next half-century as its maître d'hôtel; the cook book that bears his name collects the working repertoire of that kitchen, which is why an entry like this reads as a set of instructions to a competent pastry cook rather than a domestic recipe. Molded jellies flavored with wine, rum or punch were the plainest and most reliable dessert a nineteenth-century hotel could send out — cheap in materials, made in advance, and impressive on a cold buffet. This one is essentially a rum punch set solid: spirit, lemon, spice and sugar are the same four elements a bartender would have shaken upstairs, and "punch jelly" appears under that name in English cookery books decades before Oscar. The clarifying with egg white and the straining through a jelly bag point to the older tradition of calf's-foot jelly, where the whole virtue of the dish was its brilliance; commercial sheet and granulated gelatine, which arrived in force in the second half of the century, removed the days of boiling bones but not the expectation that a jelly should be clear enough to read through.