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Jelly of Green Gages
(England.) Skin and stone 1 1/2 pounds of ripe gages, add 10 ounces of sugar, and a few of the kernels, blanched. Boil to a pulp, add 1/4 ounce of dissolved gelatine, and pour into an oiled mould. Serve cold, with cream.
A plain fruit-and-gelatine mould of the kind that filled the sweet course in Edwardian England. Two things need attention: the gelatine quantity, which is marginal by modern standards, and the kernels, which are best left out.
- Leave the kernels outPlum and gage kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed or chewed; this is the same compound that makes bitter almonds dangerous. A few kernels boiled in a pulp is old practice and the risk is small, but there is no reason to take it. A drop of almond extract gives the same faintly marzipan note.
- GreengagesSmall green-gold dessert plums, sweeter and more perfumed than a supermarket plum, in season for a few weeks in late summer. Mirabelles or any ripe yellow plum will stand in. To skin them, cut a cross in the base and dip 30 seconds in boiling water.
- Weights1 1/2 lb of gages is roughly 680 g. 10 oz of sugar is 285 g, about 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups; the fruit is tart under the skin, so do not cut it much.
- Gelatine1/4 oz is about 7 g, which is a single envelope of powdered gelatine or three or four leaves. That will set roughly a pint, and this mixture comes to nearer three cups once the sugar dissolves. For something that must stand up out of a mould, use 10-12 g.
- Adding the gelatineBloom it in a few tablespoons of cold water, then stir it into the pulp off the heat. Gelatine loses strength if boiled, and this recipe reads as though it goes into a pan still bubbling.
- Boil to a pulpTen to fifteen minutes over moderate heat, stirring, until the fruit collapses and no longer tastes raw. Pass it through a sieve if you want a clear jelly rather than a fruit cheese; the original leaves it rustic.
- The mouldOil it with a neutral oil, not butter, which sets firm and grips. Chill at least four hours, or overnight, then dip the mould briefly in hot water and invert.
- YieldServes four to six as written; the original says only to serve it cold with cream.
The greengage takes its English name from Sir William Gage, the Suffolk baronet whose family is traditionally credited with introducing the French plum Reine Claude to England in the early eighteenth century; the story goes that the labels were lost in transit and the gardener simply called them gages. By 1900 the fruit was a fixture of late-summer English kitchens, and gelatine moulds were the cheap, showy end of the sweet course, made possible by commercial powdered and sheet gelatine that had replaced the long boiling of calves' feet. Recipes of this period frequently threw a few blanched kernels into plum preserves for the almond flavour, a habit that survives in the French kernel liqueur noyau and in old damson jam instructions, and one that later food chemistry gave good reason to abandon.