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Vanilla Jelly
Cut into pieces two vanilla beans, pour over them one quart of boiling water and turn them into a lined pan. Steep two and one-half ounces of gelatine in one pint of cold water for thirty minutes or so, then strain it and pour one pint of boiling water over it. Put the dissolved gelatine in the pan with the vanilla, add three-fourths of a pound of sugar, the juice and finely-shred peel of two oranges and two lemons and the shells and well-beaten whites of four or five eggs. Place the pan over the fire and stir the contents till boiling, then strain the mixture through a jellybag, repeating the operation till it runs quite clear. Decorate a mould with dried fruits or strawberries, then pour in the mixture and place it on the ice until firm. Turn the jelly out onto a fancy dish, and serve it.
A clarified moulded gelatin dessert of the sort that anchored a Victorian buffet table. The proportions still work; the technique is where modern habits differ.
- The hinge: leave the raft aloneStir only until the mixture comes up to a boil, then stop entirely. The egg whites and crushed shells coagulate into a raft that traps the cloudiness, and stirring after that point shreds it and sends the sediment back through. Ladle the liquid off gently rather than pouring the pan out.
- StrainingA jellybag is a cone of closely woven flannel or muslin. A sieve lined with two or three layers of damp cheesecloth does the same work. Never squeeze or press it, and pour the first cloudy runnings back through the bag until it flows clear.
- "A lined pan"Most likely tin-lined copper, though enamelled pans were also described as lined. Use stainless steel or enamel; bare aluminum or unlined copper can react with the citrus juice and dull both flavor and color.
- Gelatine quantityTwo and a half ounces is about 70 g, or roughly ten quarter-ounce envelopes, for the quart of vanilla infusion plus the pint of boiling water (the pint of cold soaking water is strained away). That is right for a jelly stiff enough to unmould and hold a shape.
- Sugar and vanillaThree-fourths of a pound of sugar is about 1 3/4 cups. Split the vanilla beans lengthwise and scrape the seeds into the water before steeping; whole pieces give up much less in a single infusion, and the seeds will be strained out with the raft anyway.
- Decorating the mouldFruit dropped into liquid jelly floats to the top, which becomes the bottom when turned out. Set a shallow layer in the mould first, arrange the fruit on it once tacky, then fill the rest in stages.
- Setting and turning out"On the ice" means setting the mould on or packed in ice, in an icebox or ice chest. Four to six hours in the refrigerator will set it, overnight is safer for a large mould. To unmould, dip the mould in warm water for five to ten seconds, loosen the edge, and invert onto a chilled dish.
- YieldAbout three pints of finished jelly from a single large mould, since the pint of cold soaking water is strained away rather than added.
Clarified moulded jellies were a set piece of nineteenth-century service, valued less for flavor than for transparency: a jelly you could read print through advertised a kitchen with time, ice and skill to spare. The egg-white raft is borrowed straight from consommé work, and the earlier form of the dish used calf's-foot stock or isinglass, both of which had to be laboriously rendered and skimmed before they could be flavored. By the time Oscar Tschirky was presiding over the Waldorf's dining rooms as maître d'hôtel in the 1890s, packaged sheet and granulated gelatine had removed that labor, which is why a recipe like this can open straight at the vanilla beans. The vanilla, oranges and lemons here are doing the work that a display cook wanted done — perfume and a faint amber cast — while the moulded fruit at the base supplied the color that the jelly itself deliberately lacks.