What was the dish made of that resembled the Galapagos Islands? Was it some sort of aspic, or gelatin, type thing, made with some type of beef or other meat juice?
Or, was it a sort of dessert thing?
Whatever it was, it looked pretty revolting, as I know they wouldn't have been able to make a chocolate type gelatin dish back then.
The plural of mouse is mice. The plural of goose is geese. Why is the plural of moose not meese?
Or, was it a sort of dessert thing?
It was an oversized version of a 'Floating Island', a popular Georgian sweet dish, and you'll find probably more than you wanted to know about it at the FAQs.
Georgians loved jelly (in the British rather than the American sense of the word), and every well-equipped gentlefolks' larder included gelatin, which cooks either bought ready-prepared or made themselves by boiling calves' feet, shavings of harts-horn or isinglass (the dried swim bladders of fish). Meat and fish dishes could be set in a savoury jelly; sweet jellies were flavoured with a wide variety of things - spices, lemon juice and/or peel, garden fruits - and could additionally be coloured with cochineal, saffron, spinach juice, etc.
Certainly they could have made a chocolate-flavoured jelly; but they wouldn't have done because the translucence of jelly was one of the things they liked about it. Those islands would not have been made of chocolate jelly; they would either have been made of meringue or have been built up like a modern trifle in layers of cake or French bread and differently flavoured sweet jellies, then covered with a 'chocolate cream'.
Flavoured 'creams' were another food the Georgians adored; some of them were literally cream whipped up with some flavouring, others were really a kind of custard made with milk, sugar and eggs. (The 'chocolate cream' in that scene certainly looks more like custard than whipped cream to me.) Typical flavourings included ground almonds, lemons, garden fruits, spices, orange-flower water, rose water - and chocolate, which was a great favourite. Georgian 'chocolate cream' is the ancestor of pretty much every modern chocolate dessert, including Lucy's Schokoladenpudding.
If you have a mind, you can read authentic Georgian recipes for both Floating Island and Chocolate Cream online:
http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/glasse-cheese-cakes-creams-jellies-16.php (Floating Island is the last recipe on this page)
http://www.hrp.org.uk/Resources/ChocolateCream.pdf
And not to be confused with the French 'île flottante', of which I had the deeply unpleasant experience of the university catering bulk-produced version in St Andrews in the '80s. A lot of us would leave dinner early when the large bowls of cold custard with soggy meringues bobbing up and down appeared on each table… "It's Floating Islands for dessert" were words that struck terror into every heart when you saw it on the menu…
A kiss on the hand may be quite continental,
But Arkenstones are a girl's best friend…
I suspect that custard and meringues are two things which would have to be made well and freshly separately, and brought together with a skilled and loving hand moments before serving up, to have any chance of being palatable at all. I can't imagine a mass-catering version ever being other than utterly revolting. You have all my retrospective sympathy!
As for the Galapagos version, I'm absolutely not a chocolate-custard girl myself so wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole, but for anyone who was, I can imagine it would be a treat. Especially as it would have been real chocolate made of ground cacao beans, not the industrial-trans-fat-adulterated stuff that modern chocolate desserts are mostly made of.
As soon as the large glass bowls, with 8 hapless meringues bobbing about on top, were placed on each table for sharing, it was a sign that dinner would be a lot shorter that day. There were one or 2 people who actually liked it, so they sometimes ended up with the whole table's bowl! I am not fond of meringues: far too sweet. And custard is better hot.
A kiss on the hand may be quite continental,
But Arkenstones are a girl's best friend…
St Andrews in Scotland? I imagine if one tried to deep fry custard they would create some sort of wildfire?
Ya Kirk-loving Spocksucker!
Pardon? You do realise that most civilised people in Scotland do not live on deep-friend crap: only the knuckle-dragging part of the population does that.
"Active but Odd"
It sounds both interesting, and revolting, at the same time.
The plural of mouse is mice. The plural of goose is geese. Why is the plural of moose not meese?
Georgia the US state or Georgia the country?
Ya Kirk-loving Spocksucker!