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Grape-juice Jelly
¼ tablespoonful lemonjuice cup boiling water tine ¼ cup cold water 1 cup sugar Soak gelatine in cold water until softened, add boiling water, and stir until dissolved. Put in sugar, lemon and grape-juice, pour into bowl or mold, and set in cold place to form.
The page has come down to us with its typesetting damaged: the quantities of gelatine and of grape juice have both dropped out, and the word appears as "tine" mid-line. What survives is a standard wine-jelly formula, and the missing figures can be reasoned about but not recovered.
- The missing amountsThe original almost certainly read something like "1 tablespoonful gelatine" and "1 cup grape-juice," but both numbers are lost and should not be treated as known. Household jellies of this period commonly used about one tablespoon of granulated gelatine (roughly one modern quarter-ounce envelope) to two cups of total liquid; here the cold water alone is 1 cup, and the figure for the boiling water has dropped out along with the rest, so the total liquid cannot be fixed.
- Gelatine has changedGranulated gelatine of this period was not sold to a standardised setting strength, so its behaviour was less predictable than the modern product, and older books often called for more of it. Sheet gelatine sets by leaf count rather than volume and is not interchangeable spoon for spoon.
- Soaking"Soak until softened" means blooming in the cold water for about five minutes, until the granules swell and go opaque. Adding the boiling water to unbloomed gelatine tends to give clumps that are slow and difficult to dissolve.
- Do not boilThe boiling water is poured onto the softened gelatine off the heat. Holding gelatine at a rolling boil weakens its setting power, which matters when the quantity is already uncertain.
- Grape juiceThe book means unfermented bottled grape juice, which in this period was usually Concord. Fresh or frozen pineapple, kiwi or papaya must never be substituted; their enzymes digest gelatine and the jelly will not set.
- "Set in a cold place"That was a cellar, an icebox or a north window. In a refrigerator allow four hours for a bowl, longer for a deep mould.
- Unmoulding and yieldDip the mould briefly in warm, not hot, water and invert onto a wetted plate. The yield cannot be calculated while two of the quantities are missing; on the assumptions above it would be somewhere around three cups.
Bottled unfermented grape juice was a comparatively new pantry staple when this book was written; its commercial production is generally credited to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a New Jersey dentist and Methodist who pasteurised grape juice in the 1860s so that congregations could take an unfermented communion. By the 1900s it was sold widely enough to be a familiar household item. Gelatine jellies were the standard way to make a small remnant of anything liquid look like a deliberate dessert, and the formula here — cold water to bloom, boiling water to dissolve, sugar, a little lemon for sharpness, then the flavouring liquid — is the same skeleton used for wine jelly, coffee jelly and orange jelly throughout the period.