PORK ALERT

T’other day I had a pre-prandial bag of pork crackling, made by Snak Shed.  This was by no means the first time.  The package looked like this (no, I have no idea why it’s cracklings rather than crackling).

Looked like this when it was open:

Then I ended the meal with Hartley’s blackcurrant jelly – package looked like this - so glad it was fat-free:

And it looked like this once I’d made it all sophisticated with tinned mandarin oranges and lemon juice and put it in a couple of opium-themed glasses:

But here’s a thing.  The number one ingredient in the pork scratching, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, was pork rind.

But what was the number five ingredient in the jelly, after the glucose and fructose, sugar and water? Yes, guessed right – it was pig – actually pork gelatin.  The beast that keeps on giving.

DANDY IN ASPIC

And speaking of hippo foot jelly, as we were, this image just surfaced from the depths of the interwebs:

It’s lamb rather than hippo, but as I often say, I think that losing our taste for aspic has been a huge detriment to western civilization.  But who listens to me?  Of course when you think of jelly you think of Bompas and Parr, who used to be known as jellymongers, but are now described as “the leading expert in multi-sensory experience design.”

I read this on a leaflet accompanying an exhibition in the crypt of St Johns, Bethnal Green, titled The Scent of Other Worlds, sculptures by Lucy Hardcastle, smells by Design in Scent, and the whole thing sponsored by Virgin, designed to give you a sniff of what other planets in the universe might smell like. Mars was my favorite:

There was no jelly at the opening party but there were cosmopolitans that came in plastic pouches, like space cocktails, I suppose.  And when I got back home, I found that his image had surfaced too.  

There’s more that one way to jelly your lamb.

EAT THE HEAD

Let’s imagine, for reasons too complicated to explain, that you happen to own a largish Hulk Hogan cake pan (maybe 15 inches across) that looks like this:

Actually I’ve always thought it looked like Will Ferrell. And let's imagine one day you think to yourself, “You know, I’ll bet I could use that thing as a jelly mould.”  Even as you think that, you’re pretty sure it’ll never work, you’ll end up with a big mess, but heck, it’s only jelly.

So you get the pan and you get some pineapple slices and you add some “grape” flavored jelly and you put it in the fridge, and you hope for the best and you’re still thinking it’ll never work.  But look at this.  Out it popped without too much trouble.  Hey, sometimes I surprise myself as well as other people.

 I didn't have a plate that was anywhere near big enough to hold the finished article.   Many people have said, cut off the head and the body will die, but since this body was never really alive it didn’t seem such a big deal.  And yes, that’s lime sorbet adding the final touch.

WHERE IS YOUR LUSTRE NOW?

I was thumbing through an old copy of Gastronomica magazine and came across this staggeringly fine ad for Tryphosa jelly dessert.  

I had never heard of Tryphosa which apparently is also the name of a woman in the Bible, but the spelling is alarmingly close to Typhosa, which is a form of salmonella.  I suppose people worried less about salmonella back then.

The Tryphosa ad is in fact so great, shining with the light of Liberty, that it’s hard to imagine the taste could possibly live up to it.  Compare and contrast with the aesthetic aspirations of the current Jell-O pack.  Not so much to live up to there.

And I did find ads for a jelly dessert named Bromangelon (which sounds like a bromance between cro-magnons). Their use of imagery was more modest still. 

The fact is, when it comes to jelly, presentation means a lot.  When I was growing up, we had jelly all the time, although my mother only approved of strawberry flavor, and she made it in a Pyrex mold much like the one used in the Bromangelon ad and as seen below.  She never tried to unmold it, and present it freestanding. I assume she’d tried at some point, possibly before I was born, and she’d had more than enough failures.

         Of course the Pyrex was the problem, glass being a poor conductor of heat, so the classic move of dipping the mold in hot water to free the jelly inside wasn’t going to do much good.

I’ve been sniffing around looking for exotic and eccentric jelly molds.  Bompas and Barr are the bosses of this kind of thing, but theirs are bespoke, and in the “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” category.

I did find the one below, which has its appeal, but it might offend more people than it amuses, even if you could say it’s an allusion to La Grand Bouffe.

I guess the real problem with jelly molds, as with my brain version below, is that they're amusing once, but only once.

But I did find one (I mean I found pictures of it online, it seems you’re unlikely to find one in the real world outside of a museum) that might be entertaining for quite a while

It’s a Wedgewood jelly mold in the shape of an obelisk.  What you’re seeing there is an an outer form and an inner core.  The latter sits inside the former, and you fill the mold with clear jelly – it has to be clear to show the pattern.  I think it might take quite a while to get bored with that.

EVERYTHING TASTES BETTER WITH HOOVES

I used to eat with relish the brains of beasts and fowls.  But with all this talk about prions and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and even as I understand that many of the dangers have been much exaggerated and in any case only apply to mad cows, eating brains no longer seems such an appealing idea.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t have brain-related fun.

See, I have this rubber monster head (above) which is in fact a jelly mould:

You open it up, put jelly in the brain pan, and a few hours later its set and you have dessert in the shape of a brain:

Those brownish speckles up at the top are cinnamon – there’s also a blob of rice pudding in there – hey, check out the symbolism!

You understand of course that in all this I am not trying to compete with the mighty Bompas and Parr – I know I couldn’t could.  Especially when they come up with stuff like this, seen recently on their Instagram – it’s Stir Fry Jelly:

They meet a better class of photographer than I do.