Recondite recipes

     Over at Books do furnish a room, Lindsay has been talking about that nourishing delicacy calves' foot jelly, commonly made by those ministering to invalids in novels which also feature smelling salts.
Here's the man himself at dinner recently choosing his pudding to match his clothing: strawberry tempura with chocolate sauce complemented our hero's pink linen shirt, captured ineptly in the far-from-up-to-scratch photograph. Having cooked for Lindsay for many years - not as his personal chef, I hasten to add - I know he enjoys good food (though his taste in beverages is suspect...), so I've offered to make the calves' foot jelly if he will agree to eat it. I've consulted Andre Simon's A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy and found a recipe which involves a five hour simmer and the use of egg shells for clarifying purposes with sherry and lemon for flavouring, then there's this one which requires isinglass: "an expensive, pure form of gelatin found in the swim bladders of sturgeon", according to Kate Colquhoun's most enticing Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking which I've been dipping into with great interest.


     Agnes Jekyll (sister-in-law of the more famous Gertrude) gives a recipe for Natural Meat Jelly in her wonderful Kitchen Essays in the section titled "For the too fat". !
Moving swiftly on, permit me a digression from the jelly theme to quote Mrs. Jekyll on cake. For a festive occasion, she suggests her "Super-Chocolate Cake", which is very similar to this one but includes sal volatile (for its leavening properties, I think, rather than its revivifying ones) and then she follows that with something a little less decadent and extravagant, describing its ideal consumers thus: "Lest this last calls for a reproach from the thrifty, here is a nice useful cake suited to the Rector's five o'clock call, or the ladies of the local political organisation in conclave....." Would that I could assign a similar 'target market' to the baking posts here at Cornflower.

Back to Kate Colquhoun, and returning neatly to where we started, she mentions an addition to the seventeenth century pantry: "Isinglass was joined by the extraordinary gelling qualities of a new ingredient: hartshorn, shavings from the antlers of deer that were also used in the production of ammonia for smelling salts".

     So, while I put the butcher on standby with the calves' feet and check to see if our local Waitrose is fully stocked in the "Recherche Items" line, I'll await your pleasure, Lindsay!