The spirit of cookery

This very excellent refreshing and nutritious dish has for ingredients 1 quart of milk, 12 oz. of white sugar powder, 4 lemons, and 1 oz. of gelatine. When milk, sugar, gelatine, and lemon-zest have been boiled, turned out into a basin and allowed to cool a little, add the juice of the lemons, and continue stirring till the casein is curdled. Then put in moulds in cold water and let set. The casein rises to the top ; when the jelly is turned out, it occupies the base, and the jelly forms the top stratum. Aspic, a Jelly with Essence of Meat. How this Greek name for a shield, and also for a venomous serpent, came to be applied to a savoury jelly is not yet explained. The jelly, if made without any solid additions, serves as a sauce with cold meat. Such a savoury jelly may, indeed, be given with all cold meat at meals. It moistens and flavours the morsel at the same time. If aspic could be made only according to the recipes of modern cookery-books, beginning with calf’s feet, etc., the frequent use of this preparation would be impracticable. But with normal broth, made by dissolving half an ounce of extract of meat in a pint of water, flavoured as you please with spices and herbs, and half an ounce of German or French gelatine, an aspic is made in a short time of a size sufficient to serve several persons at several meals. The gelatine to be employed must be in thin leaves like paper, quite transparent, and dissolve quickly in the broth without previous soaking in cold water. Its solution in pure water must be quite tasteless. A sufficiently concentrated solution of gelatine in water sets or congeals at a sufficiently low temperature. In warm seasons such congealing does either not take place, or is incomplete or tarries, and has then to be promoted by the influence of a cold atmosphere, or of cold water or of ice. In view of these uncertainties, every cook must test his gelatine as to its gelatinizing faculty some time before he wants it for actual use, and has to adapt its quantity to the amount of solidity or stiffness which he desires to obtain. The process of setting of a decoction of calf’s feet, etc., resembling the process of freezing of water by cold, caused the Italians to term the solidifying solution gelatina, the French glue; of these words the English jelly and the German gallerte are corruptions. Moreover, gelatina, was made to indicate no longer the finished jolly, but the dry material from which it is produced. Savoury jelly is not only usefal in cold pasties and in the combination with cold meat, but it is also a very excellent refreshment for sick or weak persons. It is a tasty and easily assimilated refreshment only, and by no means a substantial nutriment. The common error, that the condition of jelly, assumed, e.g., by broth on cooling, in case it has been boiled for a long time with gristle, indicates the presence of a considerable amount of nutritive matter, must be eliminated. A quart of normal jelly contains but an ounce or one thirty-second part of its weight of gelatine ; meat contains one quarter of its weight of albuminous substance. Allowing the elements of flesh and of collagen, the gristle out of which jelly is produced, to be of equal nutritive oxidizable value, a pound of meat would be eight times more nutritious than a pound of well-made culinary jelly.