a word applied to items made from flavoured solutions mixed with a setting agent, and then allowed to cool. They can be sweet or savoury, and range in texture from soft, ephemeral desserts to chewy confectionery. In scientific terms, they are substances called gels. In everyday language, the term jelly is used in three main ways.
Jelly sweets are confectionery items which use gelling agents such as gelatin or pectin to maintain syrups in a rigid form. These sweets are produced in bright colours and soft textures, and include children's favourites such as jelly babies. They have a relatively high water content for confectionery, about 15%, which means that they do not keep as well as many sweets. They may also be set with agar-agar, or a starch. Turkish delight is an example of a jellied sweet using starch as a setting agent.
Jelly desserts, as made in Europe and N. America, are mostly flavoured with fruit; see fruit jellies.
Jelly preserves are like jam, but use strained fruit juice rather than fruit pulp. In N. America, however, jelly is a general term for jam. In any case, pectin acts as the gelling agent.
The history of jelly, chronicled by Brears (1996) in a major and pioneering essay which won the Sophie Coe Prize for food history essays of that year, is complex. Generally, it would seem that confectionery-type jellies, and jelly preserves, developed from attempts to conserve pectin-rich fruit extracts; see, in this connection, the various marmalade-ancestors mentioned under marmalade. Modern dessert jellies, on the other hand, appear to be descended from medieval dishes based on calves' feet or other meat stocks, carefully clarified and flavoured.
A wide range of gelling or setting agents was known to medieval cooks. The animal kingdom was represented by gelatin in the form of meat stock; isinglass; and hartshorn. Plants provided pectin-rich juices from quinces or apples; and various kinds of gum (see gum arabic and gum tragacanth).
Late medieval and 16th-century cooks made savoury (or savoury/sweet—many had an ambivalent character) jellied dishes using meat such as capon, chopped fine, mixed with cream or almond milk, flavoured with spices, sugar, or rosewater. These were known as cullis, gellys, or brawn. Another ‘set’ dish was a leach, made from cream or almond milk with isinglass. A sweet ‘crystall gelly’ was made with calves' feet stock, highly spiced (ginger, pepper, cloves, nutmeg), sweetened, and further flavoured with rosewater. These dishes, which are recorded in early 17th-century cookery books such as Sir Hugh Platt's Delightes for Ladies (1609), were ancestors of sweet confections such as blancmange as well as of the explicitly savoury aspic dishes which proliferated in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
Brears, Peter (1996), ‘Transparent Pleasures: The Story of the Jelly, Parts One and Two’, PPC 53 and 54.
Kevill-Davies, Sally (1983), Jelly Moulds, Guildford: Lutterworth.
