Slut Red Raspberries in Chardonnay Jelly

Slut Red Raspberries in Chardonnay Jelly

I’ve been making this pudding every year since Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer was published, some years more than once! They are very pretty summery jellies, and if you can get the sun to glint on them, so much the better. I used to be a bit appalled by the name of this recipe, but I seem to have gotten over that eventually!

I usually use an Australian Chardonnay, because I like the fruity taste of Australian wines, and they are easily available to me here, and of course it came to Nigella from a fellow Australian food writer, so I’m keeping in with the original.

I like to burn off most of the alcohol (see method), because I think it tastes better, but it’s your call. Either way they are lovely fruity jellies and you only need a little cream to blend the flavours to prefection.

Just as an extra, do most of you have Nigella’s books? I’m heading towards a Nigella run of recipes and just wondered!

Slut Red Raspberries in Chardonnay Jelly
From Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer

You might think that no recipe could live up to this title. It's a reasonable presumption, but thank God, a wrong one. This is heaven on the plate: the wine-soused raspberries take on a stained glass, lucent red, their very raspberriness enhanced; the soft, translucently pale coral just-set jelly in which they sit has a heady, floral fragrance that could make a grateful eater weep. This recipe was emailed to me from Australia from my erstwhile editor, Eugenie Boyd. I've fiddled with it a bit, but it is the best present a foodwriter could ever have. Now it's yours.

1 bottle Chardonnay, choose a good fruity variety
300g raspberries
1 vanilla
pod, split lengthways (or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract)
5 gelatine leaves
250g caster sugar

1 carton double cream, to serve
1. Place the wine and berries in a bowl and allow to steep for half an hour.
2. Strain the wine into a saucepan and keep the raspberries to one side. Heat the wine with vanilla pod until nearly boiling and leave to steep on one side for 15 minutes.
3. Soak the gelatine leaves - which you can find in the supermarket these days - in cold water for about 5 minutes.
4. Remove the vanilla pod and reheat the wine stirring the sugar in until it dissolves; allow to boil if you want to lose the alcohol.
5. Add a third of the hot wine to the wrung-out gelatine leaves in a measuring jug and stir to dissolve, then add this mixture back into the rest of the wine and stir well. Strain into a large jug.
6. Place the raspberries, equally, into 6 flattish, clear glass serving bowls, and pour the strained wine over the top.
7. Allow to set in the fridge for at least 3 hours, though a day would be fine if you want to make this well ahead, and take out of the fridge 15 minutes before serving. Serve with some double cream in a jug, and let people pour this into the fragrant, tender, fruit-jewelled jelly as they eat.