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Tomato Aspic

A chilled tomato gelatin made from strained tomato juice, thickened with cornstarch and served on lettuce with mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,633 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato Aspic

Ingredients

Directions

Make the aspic

  1. Combine tomato juice, bay leaf, onion, and salt in a pot.

  2. Bring to a boil and cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve or cheesecloth.

  4. Return the strained juice to the stove.

  5. Thicken with cornstarch dissolved in cold water.

  6. Boil until clear.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into a wet mold.

  2. Refrigerate until set.

  3. Serve on lettuce leaves with thick mayonnaise dressing.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Strained tomato juice
Forms the flavorful liquid base that the aspic sets from.
Cornstarch
Thickens the hot liquid so it can set firm when chilled.

The step that matters

Boil until clear. Cornstarch must be fully boiled to swell and gelatinize; undercooked starch leaves the aspic cloudy and gives it a raw, pasty taste and weaker set.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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