No. 104

Calf's Foot Jelly with Madeira Wine

Gelee de Pieds de Veau au vin de Madere

Take the value of one quart of calf's foot gelatine and mix into it three quarters of a pound of sugar and the juice of four lemons. After the sugar is dissolved try its consistency to rectify it if necessary, adding more water or more gelatine according to whether it be too soft or too hard. Beat up four egg-whites without letting them come to a froth, mix in a gill of cold water and pour this over the dissolved gelatine; set the untinned basin on a moderate fire, whip the liquid slowly until on the verge of boiling, then withdraw it to a slower heat and keep the liquid simmering without boiling; now add the juice of four lemons; cover and leave stand for thirty minutes. The jelly should now be limpid; filter it through a flannel bag or a napkin fastened to the four feet of a filtering stool (Fig. 51), return the jelly to the bag and continue the operation until it passes through clearly; this should be done in a warm place. As soon as the jelly is properly filtered let it stand until cold and then add one gill of good Madeira, pour it into a mold previously imbedded in ice and leave it for one hour and a half to set.

← No. 103 To Prepare, Clarify and Filter Aspic Jelly Elementary Methods No. 105 Meat Jelly with Gelatine →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have already made calf's foot stock (his No. 103 and the gelatine recipes preceding it) and are now clarifying and flavouring it. The whole point of the procedure is clarity: everything else follows from that.

The hinge: never let it boilOnce the egg whites go in, the liquid must climb to the verge of boiling and then hold at a bare simmer. A rolling boil shreds the coagulated raft and drives cloudy protein back through the jelly, and no amount of filtering afterwards will recover it.
A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Both the water for the egg whites and the Madeira are measured in gills.
Calf's foot gelatine, in modern terms"The value of one quart" means a quart of liquid stiff enough to set firmly — roughly the strength of 3 to 4 tablespoons of powdered gelatine per quart. Unflavoured powdered gelatine bloomed in cold water and dissolved in warm will stand in for the calf's feet, though it lacks their faint body and mouthfeel.
The lemon juice appears twiceFour lemons go in with the sugar, and four more after the simmering. Eight lemons to a quart is very sharp; the second addition may simply be a duplication in the text. Add the first four, then taste before deciding how much of the second batch you want.
Untinned basinHe means bare copper, not the tin-lined pans used for most work. Stainless steel is the modern equivalent. Do not use aluminium or unlined cast iron with this much lemon juice.
Moderate fireOn a modern burner, medium-low, then the lowest setting that keeps a lazy shiver on the surface. The clarification wants twenty to thirty minutes of patience, not heat.
FilteringWet the flannel or napkin with hot water first, or the first quart through will be absorbed and cooled. Work somewhere warm and never squeeze the bag; pressure forces sediment through. Returning the first run to the bag, as directed, is standard — the raft itself becomes the filter.
Madeira in coldThe wine goes in only after the jelly has cooled, so the alcohol and aromatics are not simmered off. The jelly must still be liquid, though: catch it just above setting point.
Setting and yieldSetting -- The mould is embedded in ice for an hour and a half; in a refrigerator it will take longer. To unmould, dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled plate.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in the "Elementary Methods" chapter because clarified jelly was a foundation skill rather than a dish — the same procedure, savoury, yields the aspic of No. 103. Calf's foot jelly had a double life in the nineteenth century: it was the standard invalid food, simmered at home for the convalescent and mentioned constantly in domestic manuals and novels of the period, and it was also a showpiece dessert, moulded in copper shapes, flavoured with Madeira, maraschino or kirsch, and served brilliantly transparent. Transparency was the whole test of the cook, which is why Ranhofer devotes more words to the filtering stool than to the flavouring. The labour involved explains why commercial powdered gelatine, which reached American households in the 1890s, displaced the calf's feet within a generation and took the wine-flavoured moulded jelly down with it into the era of the packaged dessert.