Cranberry Gelatin: or, Surprisingly good places to put celery

Cranberries are in season, which means we at A Book of Cookrye can bring out a recipe that I've sometimes stared at for years.

Cranberry Gelatin 2 cups cranberries 1½ cup water, divided into ½ and 1 cup 1 c sugar 1 tbsp (or one envelope) powdered gelatin* 1/2 c finely diced celery 1/2 c chopped nuts, if desired 1/2 tsp salt Sprinkle gelatin into ½ cup of water, set aside.† Wash berries and coarsely grind them. If you don't have a meat grinder, put the cranberries in a food processor and run it until they are lightly pulverized. Process only about half a cup of cranberries at a time so that they all get evenly chopped.‡ Put the berries and 1 cup of water in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low, put a lid on, and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the salt and sugar, then raise the heat to high until it boils again. Reduce the heat back to low, put the lid back on, and cook 3 minutes more. Add the gelatin and stir until dissolved. Then remove from heat. Refrigerate until partially set. It should be thick enough that the berries don't sink or float after you stir it, but instead stay in place. Then add celery and nuts. (If not adding celery or nuts, give it a quick stir when it's half-set to redistribute the berries.) Pour into molds. Refrigerate until firm. Then unmold and serve. Or, you can skip the unmolding business and pour the mixture into a cute serving bowl. A clear glass (or plastic) bowl will show the cranberries' lovely color better than a ceramic one. *One standard-size (¼-ounce) envelope of powdered gelatin contains a little less than the full tablespoon the recipe calls for. But if you're going to serve this out of a bowl, one envelope of gelatin is fine. You only need a full tablespoon of gelatin if you want this to be firm enough to stand up on its own. †If desired, squeeze the juice from one or two oranges, and add enough water to make ½ cup. Then let the gelatin sit in that. By adding the orange juice after you remove the pot from heat, you avoid boiling away its flavor. ‡You can skip this part if you want. The recipe will come out a little different, but it's good either way. Source: Handwritten note, The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

Like so many of the recipes I've been meaning to get around to, I simply never had an excuse to make it. Well, the grocery store was desperately trying to unload the last of the cranberries that remained from the holidays. That was as good an excuse as any to purchase them and make a lovely.... salad? Cranberry sauce? I'm not sure what this is, and our handwritten recipe giver didn't record a title above the directions.

I've never bought fresh cranberries before. They are unexpectedly white in the middle. When you cut one open, it kind of looks like half of a tiny apple. Also, I've heard people claim that fresh cranberries are unbearably bitter without sugar, but I thought they were just fine. Fresh cranberries might stomp out the flavors of everything else in your fruit salad, though.

Anyway, this recipe begins with our meat grinder! We haven't used it in far too long, and it was nice to get it out and pulverize some produce. I like how when I'm grinding fruits and vegetables, I don't have to worry about cleaning raw-meat germs off the grinder afterward.

Setting aside the cranberries, we had to attend to the gelatin. Our recipe calls for one tablespoon of the stuff. I thought that one tablespoon of it would be the same as one envelope, but I poured our happy hoof powder into a measuring spoon just to be sure. It turns out that one standard-size packet of gelatin is almost one tablespoon, but not quite. Because I didn't want to mess up a recipe with a measurement error, I opened a second packet of gelatin to make up for the deficiency.

Pictured: one standard-sized packet of gelatin. It is less than one tablespoon.

I wondered if "Jelatine" was a long-discontinued brand of gelatin. If it was, it's thoroughly forgotten. However, a quick search through newspaper archives (thank you to the local library for the free Newspaper.com access) found various recipe pages spelling it "jelatine" until at least 1986.

This is the most recent "jelatine" I found, though I only looked for a few minutes. You should know that this diet dessert was printed between recipes for chocolate macadamia muffins and a "chocolate hazelnut truffle log."

"Southern Living Cooking School," Wichita Falls (Texas) Times, September 14 1986, page 10G

Never let it be said that I don't bloom my gelatin. Our writer didn't tell us to, but people made a lot more gelatin in those days. I think she didn't tell us to soften the gelatin for the same reason no recipe ever tells you "crack open the eggs, save the inner contents, and discard the shells."

While our gelatin sat and softened in water, we could get our main attraction onto the stove.

This is what we came here for.

After stirring the pot for a minute or so, the cranberries dyed our spoon a rather fetching shade of pink.

I always thought this recipe would prove a laborious ordeal, but we had our pot simmering before I knew it. A lot of the recipes from our "get a round-tuit" files have been a lot faster to make than we thought. 

As the timer ticked down the berries' ten minutes of simmering, we wiped up the various errant juice splats and chopped the celery.

Before the cooking time was halfway elapsed, a lovely cranberry smell came from under the pot lid. This may sound daft, but I was not prepared for my cranberry sauce to smell like cranberries. For me, cranberries have always existed in those plastic made-from-concentrate juice bottles or cans of gelatinized sauce. I have never smelled cranberry odor from anything that looked like it was derived from nature.

After ten minutes, we opened the lid to add a lot of sugar. Our simmering cranberries had turned a stunning shade of red. I didn't know you could produce such a vivid color without artificial food coloring. It looked like a pot of Kool-Aid with fruit pieces floating in it.

As directed, we let the cranberries cook another three minutes with the sugar, and then it was time to let the gelatin slither into the pot.

While we were waiting for our creation to semi-congeal in the refrigerator, I realized that I didn't know what I was making. While this would probably be a "salad" by gelatin-era standards, cranberry sauce is basically a gelatin mold. As far as I know, it is the only sauce in the world that can be served free-standing. So, were we making sauce or salad? I sent the recipe to a friend in Wisconsin with an uncalled-for question.

There you have it. We're making cranberry salad. Though perhaps the cranberry sauce/salad divide is about as muddy as the boundary between cupcakes and muffins. 

Anyway, after a bit of leisurely reading with a nice cup of tea, our salad had half-congealed and was ready to receive the completing ingredients. In full disclosure, I wasn't sure about adding nuts to this so I divided our cranberry mixture in half. One portion got the full nuts and celery, the other got celery only.

It was then time to put our cranberry salad into the various small bowls that today must pass for molds. I have to admit, our original writer's handwriting gets a bit hard to read as we reach the bottom of the page. I thought she had written "drive into moulds," which I figured must be a charmingly outdated phrase from the days when we spelled it jelatine. The phrase "drive into moulds" seems appropriate when forcing ingredients to assume all manner of freestanding shapes that they never wanted to be. I was even planning to reintroduce the phrase "drive your gelatin into molds" in future recipes. But someone pointed out that the last line simply says "pour into moulds" in particularly scrawly handwriting.

And here it is, all firmed up and ready to serve! Before I do a terrible job of getting our gelatin out of its first mold, let's have a look at the pretty scarlet color.

Unfortunately, we had some structural failures when we unmolded our jelatine. Half of it stuck to the bowl, and half of it fell out. Despite our almost-successful reassembly job, our salad was not likely to get a commendation in anyone's home economics class.

But before we taste it, we at A Book of Cookrye have a special and favorite way to eat cranberry sauce! (Or cranberry salad.)

You may think macaroni and cheese and cranberry sauce is a weird combination. But really, macaroni and cheese and cranberry sauce is merely lateral move from those cheese-cracker-and-expensive-jelly trays you see at unpleasantly boring business events. (One day I'll find out where they get those extra-bland crackers topped with flavor-free herb flecks.)

But we had two more molds to hopefully liberate in one piece. First, the mini-brick! This time, we dipped our mold (actually a food storage container) in warm water before trying to get the gelatin out of it. Instead of losing a third of our gelatin like the first time, only a small corner of it stuck to the mold. After breaking two gelatins in a row, I wondered: are you supposed to use cooking spray in your gelatin molds? If I do any more gelatins I'll have to look that up.

Lastly, we have the measuring cup. I thought a gelatin molded in this cup would have geometrical interest. It's not hard to see why.

However, while it fell out of the cup almost completely intact, it unfortunately looked like this.

But let's pretend I wasn't in the business of freestanding gelatins. Let's imagine that I poured my salad mixture into a pretty serving bowl and let it congeal there. (Since the gelatin is a very lovely color, we'll imagine I used a clear glass bowl so that you can really admire that cranberry scarlet.) Having not failed at presentation, how does it taste?

It's delicious. I totally understand why someone wrote this recipe down in a book, and I am so glad I thought to copy it for myself. I would have never thought to add celery to cranberry sauce (or cranberry salad), but cranberries and celery go together really well. I probably should have cut the celery smaller, but that's easy enough to do next time. 

However, I did not like the nuts in this. Unlike the celery, they were hard without being crunchy. And they barely added any flavor. Really, they just seemed like they landed in the gelatin by accident. And after a few days the nuts were soggy like vegetables that have boiled for too long. 

Also, if we were serving this out of a bowl instead of pretending it's a freestanding gelatin mold, we could discover that the cranberry salad is really good on rye toast.

And of course, that meant that a lot of our cranberry gelatin ended in sandwiches like this.

I liked this salad (or sauce) enough to make it again. I couldn't help but to wonder how crucial it was that we chop the cranberries. And so, I didn't bother. At first, I thought the recipe's given amount of water wasn't enough to cook the cranberries without chopping them- even though the pot looked charmingly like a cranberry bog in a TV commercial. Our cranberries cooked just fine, and we did not need to raise the waterline.

As a side note, those cranberry commercials showing those people wading through berry-covered bogs don't show you the swarms of spiders. You know how farmers keep a few semi-feral cats around as pest control? Well, cranberry farmers do the same thing... with spiders. So when people put on their thigh-high galoshes and go into cranberry bogs that are not being filmed for those quaint-looking advertisements, they are covered with literally hundreds of spiders, all of them crawling to the nearest object (or human) to get out of the water.

If you think I am batty for dumping celery into cranberry sauce (or cranberry salad, depending on your perspective), well, you may be right. In full disclosure, I like to take home those long pickles that come on the side of deli sandwiches and do this:

 

 

Shudder if you want, but peanut butter and pickle sandwiches show up in several decades' worth of cookbooks. There is precedent.

Putting aside the pickles, you may think that we made celery cranberry and peanut butter sandwiches out of a stubborn attempt to repurpose all this cranberry sauce. However, the truth is I liked the cranberry sauce more than the jelly I've been purchasing. In fact, when I ran out of cranberry sauce (or salad, I haven't decided which), I made another batch. But I also made it easier on myself by not bothering to chop the cranberries.

Purely because I like testing directions before sharing them, I decided to make this with a single envelope of gelatin, even though it's a bit less than the tablespoon that the directions demand. I was reasonably sure our gelatin would still set, but I wanted to confirm that before saying that it's possible. I also decided to forget about unmolding and just serve it from the container in which it congealed. I couldn't get over what a beautiful color it was.

I realize that for some people, adding celery to the cranberries is like that horrifying moment when you see someone dump a can of green beans into the spaghetti sauce. But I liked the combination a lot. I actually like celery in a lot of things. To me, celery is like the vanilla extract of savory foods. It makes a lot of things taste better, but I wouldn't eat it on its own.

The resulting gelatin wasn't quite as firm as the first batch. I liked it better that way- it seemed agreeably soft instead of bulletproof. So if you want to skip unmolding and let your cranberry sauce firm up in the bowl you will serve it in, I think one envelope of gelatin is better than one tablespoon of it. But for those who want their cranberries to stand on their own, you'll a bit of extra jiggly reinforcement.

I think the salad was a lot better after omitting the nuts. The celery was a perfect crunchy flavor contrast to the sweet and tart cranberries. And it made the salad (or sauce) so substantial that you could put some of it in a small bowl and eat it on its own. Even if you're skeptical of celery in cranberries, I recommend you give it a try. 

Also, this recipe is a lot easier than I thought it would be. For some reason I thought would be a daunting project, but it's mostly just putting things in a pot and letting them simmer for a while. But if you want to be even lazier than that, try adding some chopped celery to a can of whole-berry cranberry sauce. You can either thank or blame me later. 

And for those who don't like celery in their cranberries quite as much as I do, we're going to close today's recipe with the last moment before I greened up the sauce.