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Claret Jelly Sandwich
Soak one box of gelatine in one cup of cold water, then dissolve in one cup of boiling water, add one cup of sugar and strain. When cold, add the juice of half a lemon, and one cup of claret and set in a cool place. When ready for use, cover thin slices of lightly buttered white bread with the jelly, cover with another slice of buttered bread and cut in strips.
A firm wine jelly cut to fit buttered bread — a tea sandwich, not a dessert course. The whole thing depends on the jelly setting hard enough to slice cleanly.
- A box of gelatineTurn-of-the-century granulated gelatine was commonly sold in boxes of about one ounce, roughly equal to four modern quarter-ounce envelopes. That is a stiff ratio for three cups of liquid, and deliberately so: the jelly has to hold its shape between two slices of bread.
- Bloom, then dissolveThe cold-water soak is not optional padding. Give it five to ten minutes to swell before the boiling water goes in, and stir until no grains remain on the spoon.
- Do not reheat after the wine goes inThe claret and lemon juice are added when the syrup is cold for a reason: heating drives off the wine's aroma and leaves a flat, cooked taste. Add the wine while the syrup is cold but still fluid, before it begins to set.
- ClaretIn American and British usage of the period, claret meant red Bordeaux, or any dry red wine of that style. A modest Cabernet or Merlot blend does the job; nothing sweet, or the cup of sugar will push it over.
- Setting and cuttingPour into a shallow pan so the jelly sets about a quarter inch thick, then chill at least four hours, preferably overnight. Cut squares to match your bread rather than spooning it on — spooned jelly slides and weeps.
- The butter is structuralButter the bread thinly but right to the edges. It acts as a moisture barrier between a wet jelly and a soft crumb, and without it the bread is liable to go sodden.
- AlcoholThe wine is never cooked, so the alcohol remains. Worth knowing if these are going out at a tea where children are present.
- YieldThree cups of liquid makes a generous quantity of jelly, likely more than a single plate of sandwiches needs; any left over can be served cubed on its own.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the afternoon tea table and the ladies' luncheon created steady demand for something dainty, portable and endlessly variable. The sweet section of such books ran to jams, marmalades, nuts, whipped cream and jellies, all treated as fillings on the same footing as chicken or watercress. Wine jelly itself was a fixture of the late Victorian invalid cookery and dessert repertoire — claret, sherry and port jellies appear throughout nineteenth-century household manuals — and this recipe simply moves an existing dessert between two slices of buttered bread. Claret, from the Old French clairet, once meant a pale wine but had long since settled in English usage as the standard term for red Bordeaux, which is what a cook of the period would have reached for.