Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Gelatine Jelly
Gelatine Jelly
Mrs. W. Arthur.
Small packet gelatine, pint and a-half boiling water poured on the gelatine, stir until dissolved; one teacup of white sugar, a little tartaric acid, the whites of three eggs beaten, flavour with lemon; pour into a shape and let stand till next day.
A whipped gelatine "snow" jelly of the kind that filled Victorian moulds, but the three egg whites go in raw and are never brought to a safe temperature.
- Why it failsThe whites are beaten and added to a gelatine mixture whose temperature at that point is unstated; nothing in the method holds the eggs at a pasteurising temperature or for any length of time. Uncooked whites carry a Salmonella risk, and the finished jelly then stands until the next day with no cooling instruction given. Use a current recipe if you want a whipped jelly of this type.
- The overnight stand"Let stand till next day" predates domestic refrigeration; a cool larder was presumably the assumption. An egg-enriched, high-moisture jelly held at room temperature for many hours is a condition under which bacteria multiply.
- "Small packet gelatine"Genuinely ambiguous. Nineteenth-century packets of leaf or powdered gelatine varied in weight and in setting strength; there is no reliable modern equivalent to quote, and a pint and a half of liquid is a lot for one small packet.
- TeacupA teacup in this period is variously reckoned at about four to six fluid ounces, so "one teacup of white sugar" is well under a modern cup. Note also that a pint and a half is 30 fl oz in imperial measure, 24 in US.
- Tartaric acidStill sold, usually in the baking or winemaking aisle, and not interchangeable with cream of tartar. The recipe leaves "a little" undefined; its job is to sharpen the lemon and keep the sugar from tasting flat.
- "Pour into a shape"A "shape" is the mould, and by extension the turned-out dessert itself. Victorian moulds were often tinned copper or earthenware, dipped briefly in warm water to release.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) carries recipes under the names of local women — hence "Mrs. W. Arthur" — though much of its content was taken over from an earlier American Home Cook Book, so those attributions cannot be read as straightforward records of local contribution. It is often described as the first substantial Canadian community cookbook, modelled on American charity compilations of the same decade. Its several gelatine recipes mark a real change in the kitchen: where an earlier cook extracted her own jelly by simmering calves' feet or isinglass for hours and clarifying the result, by the 1870s commercially packaged sheet and powdered gelatine had made a moulded jelly an afternoon's work. Whipping beaten egg whites into a setting jelly to produce a pale, foamy "snow" was the fashionable finish, and the same trick underlies snow pudding and the whipped charlottes and creams that fill dessert chapters of the period. The reliance on raw whites is simply what the era assumed was harmless.