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Easter Jelly
Color calf's-foot jelly a bright yellow by steeping a small quantity of dried saffron leaves in the water. Pare lemons in long strips about the width of a straw, boil in water until tender, throw them into a rich syrup, and boil until clear. Make a blanc-mange of cream, color one-third pink with poke-berry syrup, one-third green with spinach, and leave the other white. Pour out eggs from a hole a half inch in diameter in the large end, wash and drain the shells carefully, set them in a basin of salt to fill, and pour in the blancmange slowly through a funnel, and place the dish in a refrigerator for several hours. When ready to serve, select a round, shallow dish about as large as a hen's nest, form the jelly in it as a lining, scatter the strips of lemon peel over the edge like straws, remove the egg-shells carefully from the blanc-mange, and fill the nest with them. Mrs. C. M. Coates, Philadelphia.
This is a Victorian table centerpiece — a jelly nest filled with blancmange "eggs" molded in real shells — and two of its instructions put it out of reach of a modern kitchen. The problems are the coloring and the shells.
- Poke-berry syrup is the fatal flawThe berries of pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) contain phytolaccatoxin and related saponins, plus alkaloid in the seeds. They are emetic and purgative in small amounts and have caused serious poisoning, particularly in children, who are exactly the audience for an Easter nest. Nineteenth-century cooks and dyers used pokeberry juice freely as a pink colorant; that use has not survived scrutiny, and no quantity of it belongs in food.
- The eggshells are a second, separate riskThe recipe never says whether the cream is heated; what it does say is that the blancmange goes into shells that have only been "washed and drained," then sets for hours and is served cold. Shell exteriors can carry Salmonella, and the wash described neither sanitizes them nor keeps the funnel and the opening clean. Nothing in the sequence as written is specified to reach a temperature that would correct it.
- Calf's-foot jellyThe base is a gelatin stock made by long-boiling split calves' feet, then clarifying with egg white and straining through a flannel bag. Prepared sheet and shred gelatins were on the market by this date, but the recipe still assumes the reader has a pot of homemade jelly on hand.
- "Dried saffron leaves"Saffron has no usable leaves; the term as used here means the dried stigmas, sold loose and steeped for color as much as flavor. A very little goes a long way, and old recipes calling for saffron by the pinch are working with a far stronger tint than most cooks expect.
- Blanc-mange, 1880s senseThe name covered several things in this period: creams set with gelatin or isinglass, with Irish moss, or with cornstarch. What matters here is that it must be stiff enough to unmold from a shell without slumping. The half-inch hole is why it has to go in slowly through a funnel, and it is chilled several hours to set.
- "A basin of salt to fill"Salt poured into a bowl to hold the emptied shells upright while they fill and set; since the hole is cut in the large end, that end sits uppermost.
- If you want the effectUse a current recipe for a molded gelatin dessert and food-safe coloring. The nest-and-eggs presentation is worth reviving; this particular set of instructions is not.
Easter dishes shaped as nests appeared on the American showpiece table in the 1880s, when a dessert that looked like something other than dessert was prized. The Dixie Cook-Book, published in Atlanta in 1883 and assembled largely from contributions by named women — this one from a Mrs. C. M. Coates of Philadelphia, which tells you how wide the network of correspondents ran — is full of such constructions: jellies lining molds, blancmange tinted in three colors, lemon peel cut to imitate straw. The colorings are the period detail worth noticing. Cooks reached for what the garden and the hedgerow gave them: spinach juice for green, cochineal or beet or pokeberry for pink, saffron for yellow. Spinach and saffron are still with us. Pokeberry is the one that modern toxicology has removed from the pantry.