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Vegetable Salad with Aspio Jellt, Italian Style

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 Aspio Jellt, Italian Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Gut and slice the potatoes with a round cutter about the size of a quarter.

  2. Slice the pickled beets in the same way.

  3. Place the sliced beets in separate bowls.

  4. Season the potatoes and beets with salt, pepper, olive oil, and vinegar.

Cook and season the flounder

  1. Scrape off the skin of the flounder fillets.

  2. Place the flounder fillets in a buttered flat saucepan.

  3. Season the flounder with salt, pepper, and a little white wine.

  4. Cook the flounder until done.

  5. Set the cooked flounder aside to cool.

  6. Cut the cooled flounder into scallops.

  7. Mix the scallops with the same quantity of boned anchovies.

  8. Season the mixture with salt, pepper, olive oil, and vinegar.

Assemble and serve

  1. Decorate a mold with aspic jelly.

  2. Add capers, olives, anchovies, and chopped hard‑boiled egg whites to the mold.

  3. Combine the flounder, anchovies, drained potatoes, beets, capers, and a few spoonfuls of mayonnaise dressing in a bowl. Gently mix the bowl contents.

  4. Fill the center of the mold with the mixture. Smooth the top evenly.

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

  6. Garnish the salad 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
Provide the firm, bulky body of the salad, holding their shape in the set aspic.
Flounder fillets
Supply the main cooked fish texture, flaking into tender pieces within the salad.
Aspic jelly
Sets the salad into a firm, sliceable mold and gives it a glossy finish.
Boned anchovies
Add salty, savory depth that seasons the fish and dressing.
Hard boiled eggs
Contribute a firm, mild texture and a clean, creamy richness to the mold.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and moisture, binding the mixture and keeping it creamy.

The step that matters

Set the cooked flounder aside to cool before cutting. Cutting or mixing warm fish breaks it into mush and releases moisture, so it must cool and firm before it is scalloped and combined with the dressing and aspic.

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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