gelatin is the final result obtained from boiling down collagen sources such as the skin, bones, tendons, ligaments, and hooves of cows or pigs; it is sold in either powdered or sheet form. Reconstituted into a flavorless, clear liquid, this fining agent or solidifier was a popular ingredient during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for making jellies, mixed drinks, and some ales. The “calves-feet jelly” specified in the recipes for Oxford Punch, Lawn Sleeves, White Wine Negus, Restorative Punch, and Egg Punch contained in the pioneering Oxford Night-Caps was a fining agent, capturing proteins and other particulates as the jelly solidified, thereby speeding up the clarification process when the mixture was strained before service.
London celebrity chef Alexis Soyer prescribed a way to make jelly stock in 1851, placing two calves’ feet in three quarts of water and simmering the mixture for five hours. The resulting base was combined the next day with Rum Punch to make a spirituous dessert jelly. The same principle was adapted by Jerry “the Professor” Thomas in his Punch Jelly, a sherbet-cum-cognac and Jamaican rum concoction, appearing in his 1862 The Bar-Tender’s Guide. See Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”.
The techniques for employing gelatin as a fining agent or as a solidifier for mixed drinks rarely appeared after the turn of the twentieth century until they were rediscovered and revived at the turn of the twenty-first: Barcelona’s Dry Martini Cocktail Bar included jellified versions of a gin and tonic and a Negroni on its menu that followed Soyer and Thomas’s techniques, while London’s Hawksmoor steak restaurant featured a revival of the Victorian-era Criterion Milk Punch that was fined with gelatin.
Oxford Night Caps. Oxford: Henry Slater, 1827.
Soyer, Alexis Benoit. The Modern Housewife. New York: D. Appleton, 1851.
Soyer, Alexis Benoit. A Shilling Cookery for the People. London: George Routledge, 1854.
Thomas, Jerry. The Bar-Tender’s Guide. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1862.
By: Anistatia R. Miller and Jared M. Brown