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Clear Coffee Jelly
1½ tablespoonfuls 3 tablespoonfuls sugar gelatine + cup cold water cup boiling water 1 cup clear coffee Few drops lemon-juice Sliced bananas Soak gelatine in cold water, melt in boiling water, add sugar, coffee, and lemon-juice. When partly stir in slices of banana. Mold and serve with rich milk or whipped cream slightly sweetened.
A simple coffee gelatin set with banana, from an era when leftover breakfast coffee was treated as a usable ingredient rather than something to pour out. The proportions as printed are unreliable, so work from the standard ratio for gelatin desserts.
- Gelatin quantityThe ingredient list is scrambled, but the two figures given (1 tablespoonful and 3 tablespoonfuls) most likely belong to the gelatine and the sugar respectively. One envelope of powdered gelatin (about 1 tablespoon, 7 g) sets 2 cups of liquid to a soft mold, which agrees with the tablespoon reading.
- Liquid amountsThe water measures have lost their fractions. A workable reconstruction, given the 1 cup of coffee, is about 1/4 cup cold water for softening and 1/2 to 3/4 cup boiling water to dissolve, but the printed figures are guesswork.
- Softening the gelatinSprinkle over the cold water and leave five minutes until it swells and looks pebbly, then pour on water that has just boiled and stir until no grains remain on the spoon. Undissolved granules are the usual cause of a cloudy or grainy set.
- Clear coffeeThis means brewed coffee strained free of grounds and without milk, not a weak brew. Filtered drip coffee works; anything with sediment will settle out and cloud the jelly.
- The lemon juiceA few drops only. It sharpens the coffee flavor, and going further will both taste sour and, in quantity, weaken the set.
- "When partly"The original has dropped a word here: the sense is when partly set, i.e. thickened to the consistency of raw egg white. Add the bananas at that point or they float to the top and the fruit collects in one layer.
- BananasSlice them at the last moment and toss with a little of the lemon juice. Cut banana browns quickly and shows through a clear jelly.
- Chilling and yieldFour hours in the refrigerator for a small mold, or overnight. This makes roughly a pint, serving four.
- UnmoldingDip the mold briefly in warm water and invert onto a cold plate. "Rich milk" in this period generally meant creamy top milk rather than skimmed; light cream is the nearest modern equivalent.
Coffee jelly belongs to the long Victorian and Edwardian enthusiasm for gelatin desserts, though the relationship between that vogue and the arrival of granulated gelatin in packets, which meant it no longer had to be extracted at home from calves' feet, is less tidy than it is sometimes made to sound: coffee jelly appears in American cookbooks before packaged gelatine was widely available. The pairing with banana reflects the fruit's shift, over the late nineteenth century, from an expensive novelty to a cheap staple of American greengrocers.