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Gelee a La Creme De Cocoa
Melt one and a half ounces gelatine--leaves are the best--with one and a half pints warm water in a saucepan; add half pound granulated sugar, the rind of one lemon, mix well for five minutes, then add the whites of three eggs, well beaten up; mix again for one minute. Set the pan on the fire, gently stir and as soon as it comes to a boil add one gill cold water. Shift the pan to the corner of the range and let slowly simmer for ten minutes. Skim off the white froth and strain the jelly through a jelly bag or fine cloth into a bowl. Add one-quarter gill creme de cocoa, mix well for half minute and let cool a little, then fill a quart mould with this jelly. Place the mould on the ice and let freeze for one hour, or until the jelly is well set. Carefully immerse the mould in luke-warm water, immediately lift up, wipe all around, turn on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A clarified wine-style jelly flavoured with chocolate liqueur, set firm enough to stand unmoulded on a napkin. Almost all of the technique is in the clarification and the setting; the flavouring is an afterthought poured in at the end.
- The hinge: treat the egg white as a raftThe beaten whites are there to clarify, not to enrich. Once the pan comes to the boil and the cold water goes in, stop stirring entirely — the coagulated white must rise and hold together so it can be skimmed and strained off. Stirring at that point breaks it up and you get cloudy jelly.
- Gelatine quantityOne and a half ounces is about 42 g, or roughly 20 modern leaves at 2 g each. Total liquid comes to close to a quart (1.5 pints plus a gill plus a quarter gill), so this is a firm, sliceable set built for unmoulding, not a soft spoon jelly. Soak the leaves in cold water until floppy, squeeze, then dissolve in the warm water rather than dropping them into hot liquid dry.
- GillsA gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup. The quarter gill of crème de cacao is therefore 1 fl oz, two tablespoons — restrained for a quart of jelly. Up to twice that is reasonable if you want the chocolate to read clearly, but more will slacken the set.
- Crème de cacaoA sweet cacao-flavoured liqueur, still sold in clear (white) and dark forms. Clear keeps the jelly pale and translucent; dark muddies it and rather defeats the clarification. Add it off the heat, as the recipe directs, so the aroma is not driven off.
- "Corner of the range"On a coal range the corner was the coolest spot. Read it as the lowest possible burner setting — a bare tremble, no rolling boil, for the ten minutes of clarifying.
- Lemon rindPare it in wide strips with no white pith, which turns bitter over ten minutes of simmering. It is strained out with the raft.
- "Freeze" means chillIce here is the icebox, not the freezer. Actually freezing a gelatine jelly ruins the texture — it weeps and turns grainy on thawing. Refrigerate, and allow longer than the stated hour if a quart mould is not yet firm.
- UnmouldingA few seconds in lukewarm water is enough. Longer and the outer surface slumps. Dry the mould, invert onto the serving dish, and give it one firm downward shake.
- YieldA quart mould serves six to eight as a dessert. Serve with unsweetened whipped cream if you want to offset the sugar, which at half a pound is generous by current taste.
Moulded, crystal-clear jellies were the show pieces of the late nineteenth-century table, and the labour in this recipe is all spent on clarity: egg whites raised as a raft, skimmed, then strained through a jelly bag. Before commercial gelatine, that transparency had to be won by boiling down calves' feet, and a well-set jelly was read as evidence of a competent kitchen. Leaf gelatine, which the recipe rightly prefers, was the professional's product — sold in sheets, and softened by soaking before use. Crème de cacao belongs to the same era's fashion for flavouring desserts with liqueurs rather than fresh fruit, and the French dish name is typical of American hotel and restaurant cookery of the period, which took its vocabulary wholesale from Paris even when the technique was ordinary household work.