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Macedoine Jelly
Finely chop six candied cherries, one each candied pear, apricot, peach, and one ounce candied angelica. Place these articles in a bowl with a tablespoon rum and mix well. Prepare a rum jelly, and when you strain the jelly into the freezer add the contents of the bowl. Mix well and let set, turn on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A moulded jelly dressed with candied fruit, from the era when a clear gelatine set on a napkin counted as a dinner-party dessert. The recipe assumes you already have a rum jelly formula on hand and that you know what a "freezer" meant in 1900.
- "The freezer" is a mould"The freezer" -- In this period the word usually means the metal can or pail of an ice-cream freezer, packed round with cracked ice and salt. Here it serves only to chill the jelly until set, not to freeze it; a metal or ceramic mould in the refrigerator does the same work.
- Rum jelly, in proportionThe recipe assumes a formula it does not give. A jelly of this kind would be built like a wine jelly: sugar syrup, water or thin fruit juice, gelatine, lemon and rum, strained (the recipe does say to strain it) for clarity. As a modern guide, about one envelope of powdered gelatine (roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons) per 2 cups of total liquid, with the rum a modest fraction of the liquid. Spirit is generally stirred in off the heat at the end, which preserves the flavour and avoids weakening the set.
- Candied angelicaThe green candied stems of Angelica archangelica, once standard in every confectioner's drawer and now a specialty item. Candied citron peel or green candied pineapple stands in for the colour and the resinous bite.
- Fruit quantities are loose"One each candied pear, apricot, peach" reads as one whole candied fruit apiece rather than one slice. Diced small, the total will be roughly a cupful, though it depends entirely on the size of the fruits.
- Macerate first, and drainMacerate first -- The tablespoon of rum over the chopped fruit softens it and lessens its drawing liquid from the jelly. The recipe says to add the whole contents of the bowl; if you would rather keep the jelly perfectly clear, drain off any loose syrup first.
- Getting the fruit suspendedAdd the fruit when the jelly is cool and beginning to thicken to raw egg white, not while it is still hot and thin. Added too early, candied fruit sinks and you get a clear top and a solid sludge at the bottom. A brief stir every ten minutes as it sets keeps it distributed.
- Setting timeFour to six hours in the refrigerator for a quart mould, overnight if it is deep. To unmould, dip the mould a few seconds in hot water and invert onto the plate.
- The napkinServing on a folded napkin was a standard period convention; it would also absorb meltwater and help keep the jelly from sliding on the dish.
Macédoine is French kitchen shorthand for a mixture of fruits or vegetables cut to a uniform dice, and the name is generally traced to the idea of Macedonia as a patchwork of peoples under Alexander — a culinary joke about diversity in one bowl that was already old by the nineteenth century. Moulded gelatine desserts like this one were prestige food for most of the 1800s, since clarifying calf's-foot stock or isinglass into a transparent jelly took a day's labour; commercial powdered gelatine, widely available in American groceries by the 1890s, put them within reach of any household with an icebox, and cookbooks of the following twenty years are thick with them. Candied fruit did the work that fresh fruit could not, supplying colour and sweetness out of season, and the rum marks this as an adult dessert meant to close a formal meal rather than a nursery pudding.