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Gelatine
Mrs. J. H. Mead.
Take a good packet of gelatine, the juice and rinds of three lemons, soak for one hour in a pint of cold water; then add three pints boiling water, two pounds of white sugar, one pint of wine; strain into moulds, and set out to cool.
This is a Victorian wine jelly: a moulded lemon jelly stiff enough to turn out whole and stand on a dish. The vague "good packet of gelatine" is the one thing that decides whether it works.
- How much gelatineNineteenth-century packets of sparkling gelatine were small, commonly on the order of half an ounce to an ounce, and a quart of liquid per half-ounce was a rough working proportion. This recipe has five pints of liquid in all (a pint of cold water, three pints boiling, a pint of wine), so you will want something like 2 oz of gelatine — about eight modern quarter-ounce envelopes, or 55-60 g of leaf gelatine — for a jelly firm enough to unmould. Half that will set only to a soft spoonable jelly in a bowl.
- Bloom, then dissolveThe hour's soak in cold water is the bloom, and it is not optional; gelatine dropped straight into hot liquid goes lumpy. The three pints of boiling water then dissolve it. Stir until no grains remain when you lift the spoon.
- The rindsPare the zest off in strips with no white pith, which turns the jelly bitter. Add them with the cold soak so they steep, and remove them at the straining.
- SugarTwo pounds is about 4½ cups — very sweet by current taste, and the sweetness is doing structural work in a jelly this dilute. Cutting it to a pound is reasonable if you have measured your gelatine generously.
- The wineA pint of sherry, madeira or a light white wine. Add it after the boiling water has cooled somewhat rather than into the boiling pan, so the flavour is not driven off. The alcohol is never cooked out, so this is not a dish for children.
- Straining for clarity"Strain into moulds" means through a scalded flannel bag or a double thickness of muslin, and without squeezing. Squeezing pushes fine sediment through and clouds the jelly, which was the whole point of pride in a wine jelly.
- Setting"Set out to cool" meant a cold larder or an ice chest. Refrigerate four to six hours, or overnight for a large mould. Dip the mould briefly in warm water to turn it out.
- YieldAround two and a half to three quarts once the sugar is dissolved — sixteen or more small moulds, or one very large one.
Wine jelly of this kind marks the moment when packaged gelatine displaced the labour it replaced. Earlier cooks made clear jelly by boiling calves' feet or isinglass for hours, clarifying with egg white and straining through a flannel bag hung overnight; by the 1870s branded refined gelatine made the same dish an afternoon's work, and recipes shrank to a few lines like this one. The result was standard invalid cookery as well as party food — clear jelly was thought light and restorative, and was carried to the sickroom as often as it was turned out for a supper table. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions by named local women and sold for charity, is typical of the subscription cookbooks of the period: each recipe carries its donor's name, and the brevity assumes a reader who already knows what a jelly bag is.