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Aspic Jelly. a Tretty Entree.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Aspic Jelly. a Tretty Entree.

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare jelly according to the instructions for wine jelly, omitting sugar, lemon, wine, and spices.

  2. Flavor the jelly with onion or shallot, parsley, pepper, and coarse sea salt, boiling these in the jelly.

  3. Add tarragon vinegar after boiling.

  4. While the jelly is still liquid, dip molds in cold water.

  5. Place decorative items like lettuce, shrimps, oysters, hard-boiled egg, capers, peas, carrot, calf's head, chicken, or fish into the molds.

  6. Fill the molds with the liquid jelly and let it set.

  7. Once set, carefully turn out the jelly and serve garnished with parsley or endive.

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. Tarragon + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (gelatin, parsley, pepper, tarragon, vinegar, lettuce, shrimp):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against gelatin, parsley, pepper, tarragon, vinegar, lettuce, shrimp. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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