No. 3178

Californian Pineapple Jelly

Gelee aux Ananas Californienne

Pare neatly a ripe, medium-sized pineapple; split it in two lengthwise; remove the core and cut it into thin crosswise slices; arrange these in a dish and cover with a quart of thirty-degree syrup and one gill of cognac; let macerate for two hours. Put into a tinned basin four ounces of gelatine with a quart of water, the juice of four lemons and six oranges, also the peel of half a lemon and the same of an orange; clarify with six egg-whites, adding, just before the filtering process, all of the syrup used for marinating the pineapple. As soon as the jelly is properly filtered pour it into a vessel, cool partly on ice, and let fall on the top three pure gold leaves; mix the jelly so that the gold separates and spreads. Incrust a jelly mold on pounded ice, pour into it a layer of the gold mixed jelly and let it get hard; on this dress a crown of the prepared pineapples, drained and well wiped, and over pour a second layer of the jelly; when this is also hard range another crown of pineapple, and continue until the mold is full. Set the jelly on ice for two hours to stiffen thoroughly; unmold it on a cold dish and surround the base with a circle of the slices of pineapple, one overlapping the other.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's showpiece jelly: a clarified citrus jelly flecked with gold leaf, layered with macerated pineapple in a mold. Two things will decide whether it works — the enzyme in the pineapple and the strength of your gelatin.

Fresh pineapple will destroy the setFresh pineapple can wreck the set -- Raw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatin and can leave the jelly slack or frankly soupy. Cooking the fruit, or at least heating it through in the syrup, deactivates the enzyme; the cold two-hour maceration as written does not. The recipe gives no indication that the syrup was applied hot.
Four ounces of gelatine is far too much todayFour ounces of gelatine is probably more than a modern cook needs -- Nineteenth-century gelatine was not standardised for strength, so any equivalence is guesswork. For the two-plus quarts of liquid here, about 2 oz (eight ¼-oz envelopes) of modern powdered gelatin should give a jelly firm enough to unmold; the full 4 oz risks something closer to rubber. Test a spoonful on a cold saucer before committing the batch.
Thirty-degree syrupThirty degrees on the Baumé scale, read with a saccharometer; roughly 55 percent sugar by weight. Two pounds of sugar dissolved in a quart of water lands in the same range, if a little weaker.
A gillFour fluid ounces, half a cup. That is the cognac quantity, and it also thins the set slightly; account for it when judging the gelatin.
Clarifying with egg whitesThe whites are whisked into the cold liquid, brought slowly to a bare simmer without stirring once they begin to coagulate, and the whole strained through a jelly bag or several layers of scalded muslin. The syrup goes in only just before filtering, as instructed, which would keep its sugar and acid out of the raft; Ranhofer does not say why. Straining a second time through the same bag gives a clearer result.
Gold leafUse only edible gold, 22 carat or finer, sold as leaf or flakes. Imitation leaf — "Dutch metal" — is brass and is not food. Three leaves stirred into partly set jelly will streak rather than dissolve, which is the intended effect.
Incrusting on iceThe mold was buried in pounded ice, often with salt, to chill each layer fast. A refrigerator does the same work more slowly: allow 20 to 30 minutes per layer, and be sure each is set but still tacky before the next goes on, or the layers will slide apart when unmolded.
YieldThe liquid comes to well over two quarts (a quart of water, a quart of syrup, and the juice of four lemons and six oranges, less what clarification takes), so allow a mold of at least three quarts once the fruit is layered in. Serves 10 to 12 as a cold entremets.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty years cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and this jelly is a fair sample of its ambitions: clarified by hand, molded in layers on ice, and gilded. Gold leaf on food is far older than Delmonico's — medieval and Renaissance banquet cookery gilded everything from marchpane to whole birds — but by the 1890s it survived mainly in restaurant confectionery as a signal of expense. The name is the puzzle. Pineapples were not a Californian crop; they came to New York from the West Indies. What "Californienne" was meant to convey in a French-trained American kitchen of the 1890s is not clear from the record. Ranhofer names dozens of dishes after places, patrons and occasions, and the geography is often decorative rather than literal.