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Ox-Tongue in Aspic Jelly

A chilled aspic dish featuring a boiled ox tongue set in gelatin with optional beetroot garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beetroot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 745 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ox-Tongue in Aspic Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Trim the roots off the skinned cold boiled tongue.

  2. Pack a large mould in ice.

Set the aspic and tongue

  1. Pour a little warmed aspic jelly to cover the bottom to about ½ inch deep. Let it set.

  2. Garnish with beetroot cut in various shapes. Pour over a little more aspic to set them.

  3. Place the tongue upside down on top. Pour over 1 cup of jelly to fix the tongue in place.

  4. Fill the mould with jelly. Let it set until firm.

Serve

  1. Turn it out onto a dish. Garnish with parsley and pickles. Serve.

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. Beetroot + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together745 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox tongue
Forms the main meat centrepiece of the dish.
Gelatine
Sets the stock into a firm jelly that holds the tongue and garnish in shape.
Stock
Provides the liquid base that becomes the savoury aspic jelly.
Pickled beetroot
Adds colour and a tangy, sweet-sour flavour to the decorative layer.

The step that matters

Let each layer set before adding the next. Gelatine sets as it cools below its setting point. If a new layer is poured over one that is not yet firm, the layers can mix, and the garnish can shift or float instead of staying in place.

“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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