No. 3183

Strawberry or Raspberry Jelly

Gelee aux Fraises ou aux Framboises

Boil one quart of syrup to thirty degrees, pour it still boiling on a pound of good picked strawberries or raspberries; two hours later strain this syrup through a jelly bag. Clarify and filter four ounces of gelatine in a quart of water with six beaten whites, let cool off partly, and add to it the strawberry or raspberry syrup, and a few drops of carmine. Incrust a jelly mold (Fig. 154) on chopped ice, fill it with the jelly, and put the cover on top; cover this with ice and leave the jelly to set for two hours; when ready to use dip the mold into hot water and unmold the jelly on a cold dish.

← No. 3182 Russian Jelly Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3184 Tunisian Jelly, Ribboned →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a confectioner's saccharometer, sheet gelatine of nineteenth-century strength, and an ice chest. All three need translating before this will set properly on a modern table.

"Boil one quart of syrup to thirty degrees"The recipe names no scale; in nineteenth-century confectionery a syrup hydrometer reading of thirty degrees almost certainly means degrees Baumé. That is a heavy syrup of roughly 55 per cent sugar by weight — in practice something like 2 lb of sugar dissolved in a quart of water and reduced a little. If you have no hydrometer, aim for that ratio rather than guessing at a boiling time.
Gelatine strengthFour ounces of 1890s sheet gelatine is not the equivalent of four ounces of modern powder, which is generally the stronger setter. For the two quarts of finished liquid here, something in the region of 1 oz (four 1/4-oz envelopes) of modern powdered gelatine should give a jelly firm enough to unmold and still pleasant to eat; test a spoonful chilled before committing the mold. Bloom it in cold water first. The original's boiling-and-filtering step is there to clear the gelatine as well as to dissolve it.
The egg-white clarificationThe six beaten whites are a raft: they coagulate in the hot gelatine solution, trap sediment, and are strained out. Do not stir once the whites begin to set, or the raft breaks up and clouds the liquid you are trying to clear. Filtering through a jelly bag or a doubled cloth is what produces the glass-clear result the dish is for.
Fruit infusion, not fruit juicePouring boiling syrup over the whole berries and leaving them two hours extracts colour and perfume without pulp. Do not press the fruit through the bag; pressing is what makes the finished jelly cloudy. Reserve the drained berries for a fool or a sauce.
Temperature at the mixing point"Let cool off partly" matters. Add the fruit syrup while the gelatine is still hot and you dull the fresh berry flavour; let the gelatine cool too far and it begins to thicken, so the two liquids streak instead of blending. Blood-warm, and both liquids at similar temperatures, is the target.
CarmineCarmine is cochineal, still sold as a liquid food colour and still an insect-derived product — worth knowing for vegetarian guests. A few drops only; the point is to correct the brownish cast that heat gives berry syrup, not to dye the jelly red.
"Incrust the mold on chopped ice"This means bedding the filled mold in crushed ice up to the rim, lid on and ice heaped over it, so it chills from all sides. A refrigerator does the same job, though allow four to six hours; two hours is optimistic unless the mold is small or genuinely packed in ice.
UnmoldingDip in hot water for five to ten seconds only, wipe the mold dry, and invert onto a chilled dish. Longer and the outer surface melts to slush and loses the pattern of the mold.
YieldTwo quarts of jelly, enough for a large mold serving ten to twelve as a cold entremets.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked in thirty-odd years at Delmonico's in New York, and the jelly chapter is a fair picture of what a great restaurant kitchen could do once commercial ice made cold work reliable year-round. Molded jellies were showpiece food: clear, quivering, cut with a spoon at the table, and judged largely on clarity, which is why so much of the labour here goes into clarifying and filtering rather than flavouring. The recipe's bare instruction to bring a syrup to thirty degrees assumes a reader who knows which scale is meant and how to read it — the weighted hydrometers of professional confectionery gave a repeatable reading long before home thermometers were common. The variation offered between strawberry and raspberry is left unexplained: both fruits were available to a New York kitchen in season and preserved out of it.