Jellies

Since jellies could be spooned from dishes, as well as being cut in slices, they occupied a half-way stage between pottages and leaches. Some menus include ‘pottage callyd gele’, for example, while jelly recipes might be entitled ‘viand leach’.¹⁵⁸ Medieval cooks had noticed that the stock left after boiling certain meats and fish turned into a set or semi-set jelly as it cooled. Those with plenty of sinew and skin, i.e. collagen, were found to give the best results, and so calves’ feet and hock-joints and pigs’ trotters, ears and snouts were often used, as well as poultry, for meat jellies. For fish jellies, the ‘sounds’ or swim-bladders of stockfish, which later generations would process into isinglas, were probably the most effective ingredient, but eels or eel-skin, plaice, pike, tench and turbot could give usable results. According to the recipes, it was merely necessary to simmer the fish in white wine to produce a crystal-clear jelly, but anyone who tries this with most white fish will find that a pound/450g of fish will only make about a tablespoon of rather glue-like jelly after prolonged simmering and reduction.¹⁵⁹ Many of the recipes incorporate into the finished dish the fish or meat used to form the basic jelly, which shows that they must have been subject to a very long, very gentle simmering, rather than a brief period of hard boiling, which would have rendered them extremely tough. As the old proverb says, ‘a stew boiled is a stew spoiled’. Even though some recipes discarded the jelly-making ingredients, and poached fresh fish and meat in the jelly stock, nothing can detract from the realization that the medieval cooks were masters of their craft, skilled in temperature control and the extraction of clear jellies without recourse to any methods of clarification beyond simple straining. To compensate for this loss of skill, and lack of access to unprocessed swim-bladders, some of the following recipes incorporate gelatine as a convenient substitute.