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Vegetable Salad with Aspic Jelly, Italian Style

A chilled salad of potatoes, pickled beets, flounder, anchovies, capers, olives, hard‑boiled egg whites, and mayonnaise dressing set in aspic jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,688 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Salad with Aspic Jelly, Italian Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut out 12 small potatoes with a round cutter and slice them finely.

  2. Slice 2 pickled beets in the same way and season both with salt, pepper, olive oil, and vinegar.

  3. Prepare 1–2 flounder fillets by scraping off the skin and placing them in a buttered flat saucepan.

  4. Season the flounder with salt, pepper, and add white wine.

  5. Cook the flounder until done and set aside to cool.

  6. Once cooled, cut the flounder into scallops.

  7. Mix the scallops with the same quantity of boned anchovies, seasoning with salt, pepper, olive oil, and vinegar.

Assemble and serve

  1. Decorate a mold with aspic jelly, capers, olives, anchovies, and chopped whites of hard-boiled eggs.

  2. In a bowl, combine the flounder, anchovies, drained potatoes, beets, capers, and a few spoonfuls of mayonnaise dressing.

  3. Gently mix and fill the center of the mold, smoothing the top evenly.

  4. Set the mold in a cool place until ready to serve.

  5. Garnish with hard-boiled eggs and chopped aspic jelly.

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. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,458 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Potato + caperstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together224 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  5. Olive + vinegartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the firm, sliced base of the salad and add bulk and soft texture.
Flounder
Provides the main fish body, which firms as it cools and holds the salad together.
Beets
Add colour and a sweet-tart flavour balanced by the vinegar.
Anchovies
Add salty, savoury depth that seasons the fish and the whole salad.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and moisture, binding the ingredients into a creamy mixture.
Aspic jelly
Sets when chilled, holding the molded salad together and giving it a glossy surface.

The step that matters

Set the mold in a cool place until ready to serve. Aspic is a gelatin-based jelly that sets only when chilled. The salad needs to stay cold for it to firm and hold its shape when unmolded.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, olive, vinegar, white wine, capers, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, olive, vinegar, white wine, capers, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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