Black Tea Jelly

merrill's Notes: While Amanda and I were researching and testing old New York Times recipes for her upcoming cookbook, we came across a lot of 19th century recipes for jellies, gelatin molds and blanc-manges...

While Amanda and I were researching and testing old New York Times recipes for her upcoming cookbook, we came across a lot of 19th century recipes for jellies, gelatin molds and blanc-manges (according to my mother, pronounced “blaw-mawnge”). Both suckers for “nursery food,” we agreed that it’s kind of sad that these wobbly, comforting -- and often beautiful -- desserts have passed out of fashion in this country.

In the eighties, my mother often made a gelatin mold flavored with sherry, which she served at dinner parties with just a drizzle of heavy cream. But she hasn’t made a lot of dessert molds over the past decade, and recently she bequeathed me her wonderful collection of ceramic molds, collected over the course of several decades, each with its own wire harness for hanging and display purposes. A few weeks ago, I just happened to be thinking about all those great homemade jellies as I sipped a cup of my favorite tea, and it occurred to me that a tea-flavored jelly could be a wonderful, light end to a meal – or even part of a composed dessert, perhaps with a rich, milky ice cream and a crisp cookie of some kind.

I went home and experimented, using one of my mother’s beautiful antique molds, and came up with this almost embarrassingly simple recipe. It is indeed light -- really almost a palate cleanser -- and just barely sweet. If you like more sweetness, feel free to add more sugar; if you’re after an even more delicate tea flavor, use less tea and more water, or just steep the tea for less time. This recipe yours to play with. The only thing I don’t recommend adjusting is the proportion of gelatin to liquid.