Pine-apple, Tinned.—Pine-apples are preserved in tins whole, and are very superior in flavour to those which are sold cheap on barrows, which are more rotten than ripe. They require very little ornamenting, but the top is greatly improved by placing a red cherry in the centre, and cutting eight strips of green angelica like spikes, reaching from the cherry to the edge of the pine-apple. They should be cut in exact lengths, so as not to overlap. The top of the pine-apple looks like a green star with a red centre.
Pears, Tinned.—Tinned pears are exceedingly nice in flavour, but the drawback to them is their appearance. They look like pale and rather dirty wax, while the syrup with which they are surrounded resembles the water in which potatoes have been over-boiled. The prettiest way of sending them to table is as follows:—Take, say a teacupful of rice, wash it very carefully, boil it, and let it get dry and cold. Take the syrup from the pears and taste it, and if not sweet enough add some powdered sugar. Put the rice in a glass dish, and make a very small well in the centre, and pour all the syrup into this, so that it soaks into the rice at the bottom of the dish without affecting the appearance of the surface. In the meantime, place the pears themselves on a dish, and let the syrup drain off them, and if you can let them stand for an hour or two to let them dry all the better. Now, with an ordinary brush, paint these waxy-looking pears a bright red with a little cochineal, and place these half-pears on the white rice, slanting, with the thick part downwards and the stalk end uppermost. Cut a few sticks of green angelica about an inch and a half long and of the thickness of the ordinary stalk of a pear, and stick one of these into the stalk end of each pear. The red pear, with the green stalk resting on the snow-white bed of rice, looks very pretty. A little chopped angelica can be sprinkled over the white rice, like chopped parsley.
Fruits, Bottled.—When apricots and peaches are preserved in bottles, they can be treated exactly in a similar manner to those preserved in tins. It will be found advisable, however, to taste the syrup in the bottle, as it will be often found that it requires the addition of a little more sugar. Ordinary bottled fruits, such as gooseberries, currants, raspberries, rhubarb, damsons, cranberries, etc., can be used for making fruit pies, or they can be sent to table simply as stewed fruit. In this case some whipped cream on the top is a very great improvement. Another very nice way of sending these bottled fruits to table is to fill , as described in Chapter III.
CHAPTER X.
JELLIES (VEGETARIAN) AND JAMS.
By vegetarian jelly we mean jellies made on vegetarian principles. To be consistent, if we cannot use anchovy sauce because it is made from fish, on the same principle we cannot use either gelatine or isinglass, which, of course, as everybody knows, is made from fishes. For all this, there is no reason why vegetarians should not enjoy jellies quite equal, so far as flavour is concerned, to ordinary jelly. The simplest substitute for gelatine, or what is virtually the same thing, isinglass, is corn-flour. Tapioca could be used, but corn-flour saves much trouble. Some persons may urge that it is not fair to give the name of jelly to a corn-flour pudding. There is, however, a very great difference between a corn-flour pudding flavoured with orange, and what we may call an orange jelly, in which corn-flour is only introduced, like gelatine, for the purpose of transforming a liquid into a solid.
We also have this advantage in using corn-flour: it is much more simple and can be utilised for making a very large variety of jellies, many of which, probably, will be new even to vegetarians themselves. We are all agreed on one point, i.e., the wholesomeness of freshly picked ripe fruit. We will suppose the season to be autumn and the blackberries ripe on the hedgerows, and that the children of the family are nothing loth to gather, say, a couple of quarts. We will now describe how to make a mould of—
Blackberry Jelly.—Put the blackberries in an enamelled saucepan with a little water at the bottom, and let them stew gently till they yield up their juice, or they can be placed in a jar in the oven. They can now be strained through a hair sieve, but, still better, they can be squeezed dry in a tamis cloth. This juice should now be sweetened, and it can be made into jelly in two ways, both of which are perfectly lawful in vegetarian cookery. The juice, like red currant juice, can be boiled with a large quantity of white sugar till the jelly sets of its own accord; in this case we should require one pound of sugar to every pint of juice, and the result would be a blackberry jelly like red currant jelly, more like a preserve than the jelly we are accustomed to eat at dinner alone. For instance, no one would care to eat a quantity of red currant jelly like we should ordinary orange or lemon jelly—it would be too sickly; consequently we will take a pint or a quart of our blackberry juice only and sufficient sugar to make it agreeably sweet without being sickly. We will boil this in a saucepan and add a tablespoonful of corn-flour mixed with a little cold juice to every pint to make the juice thick. This can be now poured into a mould or plain round basin; we will suppose the latter. When the jelly has got quite cold we can turn it out on to a dish, say a silver dish, with a piece of white ornamental paper at the bottom. We now have to ornament this mould of blackberry jelly, and, as a rule, it will be found that no ornament can surpass natural ones. Before boiling the blackberries for the purpose of extracting their juice, pick out two or three dozen of the largest and ripest, wash them and put them by with some of the young green leaves of the blackberry plant itself, which should be picked as nearly as possible of the same size, and, like the blackberries, must be washed. Now place a row of blackberry leaves round the base of the mould, with the stalk of the leaf under the mould, and on each leaf place a ripe blackberry touching the mould itself. Take four very small leaves and stick them on the top of the mould, in the centre, and put the largest and best-looking blackberry of all upright in the centre. This dish is now pretty-looking enough to be served on really great occasions. We consider this dish worthy of being called blackberry jelly, and not corn-flour pudding.
Lemon Jelly.—Take six lemons and half a pound of sugar, and rub the sugar on the outside of three of the lemons; the lemons must be hard and yellow, the peel should not be shrivelled. Now squeeze the juice of all six lemons into a basin, add the sugar and a pint of water. Of course, the lemon-juice must be strained. (If wine is allowed, add half a pint of good golden sherry or Madeira.) Bring this to the boil and thicken it with some corn-flour in the ordinary way, allowing a tablespoonful of corn-flour for every pint of fluid. Pour it into a mould and when it is set turn it out. A lemon jelly like this should be turned on to a piece of ornamental paper placed at the bottom of a silver or some other kind of dish. The base of the mould should be ornamented with thin slices of lemon cut in half, the diameter touching the base of the mould and the semicircular piece of peel outside. If a round basin has been used for a mould, place a corner of a lemon on the top in the middle, surrounded with a few imitation green leaves cut out of angelica. This improves the dish in appearance and also shows what the dish is made of.
Orange Jelly.—Take six oranges, two lemons, and half a pound of lump sugar; rub the sugar on the outside of three of the oranges, squeeze the juice of the six oranges into a basin with the juice of two lemons, strain, add the sugar and a pint of water. The liquid will be of an orange colour, owing to the rind of the orange rubbed on to the sugar. (If wine be allowed, add half a pint of golden sherry or Madeira.) Bring the liquid to boiling point and then thicken it with corn-flour, and pour it while hot into a mould or plain white basin; when cold, turn it out on to a piece of ornamental paper placed at the bottom of a dish; surround the bottom of the mould with thin slices of orange cut into quarters and the centre part pushed under the mould; place the small end of an orange on the top of the mould with some little leaves or spikes of green angelica placed round the edge.