No. 3186

Wine and Liquor Jelly

Gelee aux Vins et aux Liqueurs

All wine and liquor jellies are made the same way. Prepare a sweet gelatine or fish isinglass jelly, the same as described in No. 106. As soon as this is clarified and filtered add the wine desired for flavoring the jelly, such as Madeira, Marsala, sherry, Malaga, port, etc., or any liquors such as kirsch, maraschino, noyau, Curacoa, kummel, etc., mixing the liquor well with the jelly, then pour into a mold previously incrusted on ice. Leave to harden on ice for an hour and a half to two hours.

← No. 3185 Violet Jelly Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3187 Jelly with Fruits and Kirsch →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer gives a template rather than a recipe: make a clear sweet jelly, flavor it with wine or liqueur, mold it. The two things he assumes you already know are how much gelatin to use and how much alcohol a jelly will tolerate before it refuses to set.

The base jelly (No. 106)The cross-referenced jelly is essentially sugar, water and gelatin, clarified (Ranhofer's clarifications of this kind rely on egg white) and strained until it runs perfectly clear. For a quart of finished jelly, figure roughly 2 to 3 envelopes of powdered gelatin (about 14-21 g) and 6 to 8 oz sugar, toward the higher end if you intend to unmold it.
IsinglassFish isinglass is dried sturgeon swim bladder, still sold for fining beer but rarely for cooking. Sheet or powdered gelatin gives the same result with far less fuss; 1 sheet of standard leaf gelatin equals about 2 g.
Alcohol and settingThis is the hinge. Alcohol weakens gelatin, so a jelly carrying much more than about 15 percent alcohol by volume will set poorly or not at all unless the gelatin is increased. As a working guide, fortified wine at 18-20 percent can make up about a third of the total; 40-percent liqueurs like kirsch or kummel are better held to a few ounces per quart.
When to add itAdd the wine or liqueur after the jelly is clarified and off the heat, once it has cooled to warm rather than hot. Boiling it in drives off both the alcohol and the aromatics that are the entire point of the dish.
NoyauHistorically a liqueur flavored with peach or apricot kernels, which carry trace hydrocyanic acid. Commercial crème de noyaux today is produced under standards that control this; do not substitute a homemade kernel infusion.
Curaçao and MalagaBoth are still available. Curaçao here means the dry orange liqueur, not the blue bar syrup; Malaga is a sweet Andalusian fortified wine, and a cream sherry stands in acceptably.
"Incrusted on ice"The mold was buried in a tub of cracked ice and rock salt to bring it below freezing before filling. A mold chilled in the freezer for twenty minutes and then refrigerated does the same job; his hour and a half to two hours becomes 4 hours or overnight at 38F, since a domestic refrigerator is warmer than an ice-and-salt bath.
Unmolding and yieldDip the mold in hot water for 5 to 8 seconds, no longer, then invert onto a chilled dish. A quart mold serves 8 as an entremets.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some thirty years running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and its jelly chapter reflects how much a fashionable nineteenth-century table valued transparency: a jelly that had been clarified with egg white and dripped through flannel until it was optically clear was proof of a serious kitchen, and molded jellies were built in layers and ring molds to be looked at before they were eaten. The wine jellies in particular descend from a much older European tradition of calf's-foot and hartshorn jellies, which were laborious to make and, in the eighteenth century, often regarded as invalid food; the arrival of reliable commercial gelatin in the nineteenth century turned them into an everyday restaurant dessert. Ranhofer's list of flavorings — Madeira, Marsala, port, maraschino, kirsch, kummel — is a fair inventory of what a New York wine cellar of the 1890s was expected to hold.